Word
Widsith spoke, unlocked their wordhoard, they who sent upon us wellcloud of wordpour, abundance — we who were made to grow out of the earth and return to it; so in the six-hundredth year of our life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the windows and the fountains above the great deep broke open at once and the words rained down upon us for forty days and forty nights, which is to say much, but in the words that we used then. What was the matter with us that we did not fear such breaking? What became of all that we did not say with those words before new–fallen ones washed them away? The world as in the beginning become wild and waste, the face of words not separate, and then separate; words from words as, too, the waters from the waters. And all the while the runic wynn changing to ruin. Even as she-dove showed us a well and therein the we, and a mouth breathed out a pale blue moth, and from the whorl of a whelk a newborn elk stepped impossibly out, blinking. All the earth was made wet and webbed-wide, a well and a wellspring, a worden, the sluices of heaven wording as we stood in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning.
Feature Date
- October 15, 2023
Series
- Editor's Choice
Selected By
- Brian Teare
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“Word” from The Disordered Alphabet (c) 2023 by Cintia Santana.
Appears with permission of Four Way Books.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cintia Santana is a poet, translator, and interdisciplinary artist. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Santana’s poems have been selected for Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, and the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, and featured by the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and by Split this Rock. She teaches fiction and poetry workshops in Spanish, as well as literary translation courses at Stanford University. Her first poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet, was published in September by Four Way Books.
"'Wild!' she calls out in one poem, and in another ('I am your wild'), Cintia Santana sketches a self-portrait that serves for this high-spirited book, 'I’m / your top, your spin . . . Tremble / and sway.' She’s a superb new poet, serving up gusts of generative energy and acute intelligence. There’s wordplay galore in The Disordered Alphabet, but so much more: temptation and swoon, confession, exposure, and the kind of daring formal agitation that accomplishes one rigorous shape after another to enable Santana’s discoveries and her complex harmonic voicings. The alphabet may be disordered, and the cosmos awhirl, but this book is a crystalline achievement of rapture, balance, and brilliance."
—David Baker
"In this outstanding debut collection, where 'a mouth breathed out a pale blue moth, and from the whorl of a whelk a newborn elk stepped impossibly out,' Cintia Santana harnesses a language torqued by erasure and loss, imbued with the aftermath of Hiroshima, yet filled with present-tense wonder, to create a set of spell-binding poems."
—Arthur Sze
"Cintia Santana's The Disordered Alphabet tussles with diction, wrangles with syntax, struggles with the sentence and the line in a kind of linguistic unmaking that somehow becomes a beautiful, unsettling song.”
—Ross Gay
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