Will Cordeiro \'s Trap Street travels a shifting landscape.
Currently, Will lives in Flagstaff and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University..
Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer\'s Guide and Anthology , forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Will received an MFA and PhD from Cornell University.
Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers\' Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer\'s Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. -Alfred Corn, author of The Poem\'s Heartbeat ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Will Cordeiro has work published in Agni, Best New Poets, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, the Offing, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal , and elsewhere.
We should all join in welcoming Will Cordeiro \'s amazing debut.
And visual acuity here is matched by a strenuous verbality, color-coordinated vowels informing chewable consonants in a lexicon ranging from "cattywampus" to "glumes" to "blear." It\'s a pied-beauty diction and syntax that remind me of Hopkins and Marianne Moore.
The scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus cited the "haecceitas" ("this-ness") of observed experience as one component in the quest for the divine, so there is every reason to regard Cordeiro\'s poems as bridging the gap between life\'s overlooked detritus and exalted vision itself. -David Mason, 2019 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Sound "Not everything must have some cosmic meaning." That is the sort of red-wheelbarrow faith Will Cordeiro depends on as his adventurous eye records the variegated appearance of the natural and manmade world, no detail too small to merit commemoration.
His declaration that "Earth\'s everything I am" runs through every page of the book, mordant, restless, and abiding.
Yet the person who inhabits these poems has dignified the writing of them with real care and an ear for the elevated vernacular. -Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter Trap Street is a map of vanishing dreams, true to the country as it struggles to exist.
I expect there is a bit of exaggeration here, along with the honest depiction, and that makes this a Book both of witness and warning.
These are poems written in the long pastoral tradition, except the pristine, inspiring pasture-scene, starkly, is no longer there.
What\'s left? Mindless jobs, litter, distraction, addiction, voiceless anxiety, environmental desecration, and we are to make a meaningful life from this.
Back-road towns and landscapes, down-and-out rust belt cities, the worn-out West-this is a Book that bears witness to the fizzled American dream.
PRAISE FOR Trap Street The formal elegance and beauty of these poems clash smartly with the hardscrabble world where they occur.
This exceptional debut poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, does not look away from either grime or beauty, but lays bare the nature of things.
Cordeiro\'s vivid musings are deployed with a precision of craft and diction, buttressed by symphonic wordsmithing worthy of a lexicographer.
Keenly observed deserts, woods, highways, seaside enclaves, mountainsides, and motels parade in an expansive sweep of the natural and the manmade, often returning to inhabited settings and navigating spirited-to-tense family and social situations.
Will Cordeiro \'s Trap Street travels a shifting landscape
