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    A Short History of Monsters: Poems
    A Short History of Monsters: Poems
    A Short History of Monsters: Poems
    Ebook105 pages45 minutes

    A Short History of Monsters: Poems

    By Jose Padua

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    About this ebook

    Winner, 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

    “We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua’s consciousness . . . a smart, sympathetic mind at work.”
    —Billy Collins

    Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam traditions. In his first full-length collection, Jose Padua wrestles with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope. Throughout, the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it, skewering it, and mourning it by turns.

    The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own despair and rising up again with existential absurdity. This is a poetry that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Arkansas Press
    Release dateMar 27, 2019
    ISBN9781610756631
    A Short History of Monsters: Poems

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    • 5/5
      40 poems in 90 pages, organized in 4 sections. My plan was to read a section per day - and then I realized I was reading the last poem - I could not stop. It was a part of one of the first poems in this collection, called "Pulp Fiction", that seems to hold at least some of the keys to the whole collection (or even the author):"It's been said that the truth will set you free, but whenever I speak the truth no one believes it, and whenever I hear the truth it makes me feel like a prisoneron death row. So, I tell stories to keep the truth alive without telling it. So I create truth to keep me from becoming history:"And that the whole collection is all about - a (semi-)autobiographic parts and invented pasts and futures merge with bizarre landscapes and images (nothing scarier than what Barbie may be thinking while sitting in her dollhouse). And all of them require just words - Padua doesn't play with the form of the poems or their position on the page - you don't need to see it (as many modern poets seem to require you to these days) and you don't need to try to decipher the line breaks and weird stops. But then, he is a veteran of the New York's spoken-word literary scene (as the very short biography at the end of the book will tell you) and that explains a lot. These are not exercises of poetic form and invention - these are poems to tell people, stories in a poetic form. It is also nice to have a collection which is rooted in society and the present but without retelling you the news or containing all the rage towards the present (although there is some rage in the poems but there is also a lot of hope). Billy Collins, the editor of the collection and the judge for the prize it won, has a very nice introduction both about the contest and about this collection. But don't read it before you read the collection -- I am so used to not trusting introduction that I skipped it and came back (and then reread the collection again after that).

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