What does home look like if it cannot be reduced to a single dot on a map? Love Letter to an Afterlife moves between and across the Dominican Republic, Argentina, and the United States. Rivera Prosdocimi excavates personal, family, national, and world memory within these spaces. In doing so, she demonstrates the multiplicity inherent in identity while preserving her sense of home. The poet, E. Ethelbert Miller, writes: Here are poems about papa and place. Poems about family history. Poems that rise from the casket with memories. The rooster turns its head to listen. There is something Dominican that is captured in the beak of each word as this woman moves among her people. She brings lines that are lush and filled with reminders. Yes – “Someone has set the cat among the pigeons.” Border crossing, bilingualism, and race inform these poems, but so does love and dying. In these pages, Rivera Prosdocimi offers readers some of her santos, and some of her ghosts while illustrating home as plural.
About the Author: Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi
Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi is the author of the poetry collection, Love Letter to an Afterlife (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Recently, her poem “Surrogate Twin” was selected by the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Rita Dove, and featured in The New York Times Magazine. Her work has also appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cold Mountain Review, Kweli, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Puerto de Sol, The Caribbean Writer, Wasafiri, and Witness. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Maryland and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from American University. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford where she teaches literature.
QUOTES: "Here are poems about papa and place. Poems about family history. Poems that rise from the casket with memories. The rooster turns its head to listen. There is something Dominican that is captured in the beak of each word as this woman moves among her people. She brings lines that are lush and filled with reminders. Yes -- 'Someone has set the cat among the pigeons.'"--E. Ethelbert Miller, author of If God Invented Baseball: Poems and Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer "The gods have bestowed a blessing on us in this radiant debut collection, LOVE LETTER TO AN AFTERLIFE. Above all else, these poems speak profoundly about survival and preservation of self and family, of language and culture, of memory and identity. These poems put in work, emboldening the many millions of us in the African diaspora in our determination to be, endure, and thrive in the new world. Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, we sing your name."--Jeffery Renard Allen, author of song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back "In Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi’s debut poetry collection, Love Letter to an Afterlife, the speakers in the poems are displaced in time, yearning for a half-imagined past. They are suspended between cultures, languages and racial designations. It’s a collection animated by memories of her native Dominican Republic, and most of all, by family, living and dead. It’s a displacement that feels ancient, but also thoroughly modern...From Rivera Prosdocimi’s poems we learn that for all of us identity is a building that is forever being constructed." - Rion Amilcar Scott, author of Insurrections: Stories and The World Doesn't Require You: Stories. // REVIEWS: Interview Ghosts of Time: Talking with Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi: https://therumpus.net/2018/12/the-rumpus-interview-with-ines-p-rivera-prosdocimi/ Featured in New York Times Magazine: "Surrogate Twin" from Love Letter to an Afterlife https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/magazine/poem-surrogate-twin.html Note: Currently, I'm being interviewed by Letras Latinas (University of Notre Dame). I can forward the interview once it's published. Note 2: My book is being reviewed by Meridians Journal (Smith College). I can forward the review once it's published.
