The Reddest Herring by Francisco Guevara

It is Adam and Alice, not Adam and Eve, who tend the words that flourish here—not in “paradise”—but on the blank field of the post-Edenic page. Francisco Guevara offers us the consequences: no pure naming, and what words remain find themselves subject to that errancy that swerves between bewilderment and wonder. In these poems we find some rescue from those inherited forms of knowledge that seem to betray “the un- / danceable sun of I & one” that promises the inchoate continues to exist beneath those hierarchies of meaning poetry seeks—as does each of these poems—to dismantle, not to frustrate “knowledge” merely, but to liberate it back into childish praise. Such praise infuses these poems, where each word acts as a nerve, teaching us again that words work as a form of perception, and the mind must learn to feel before it remembers how to think. - Dan Beachy-Quick