In world as sacred burning heart, Jeremy Paden offers a collection of poems set in Colonial Latin America that weaves together three strands. There are prose poems about Captains like Columbus, Cortés, and Las Casas that play with the language and syntax of sixteenth-century chronicles. These poems use irony to interrogate the official story. The second strand is ekphrastic poems on maps, on quipus, on Aztec featherwork mosaics, and other cultural objects. The third strand is poems of resistance and poems of coming into knowledge. To live in the American hemisphere is to live in a colonial state. These poems examine and interrogate that legacy. They respond to the self-aggrandizing myths the Western world tells itself about its own past. This collection argues that America (North and South) is a palimpsest, a layered story, born out of colonial occupation and resistance. Ultimately, these poems ask two urgent questions: can we live with “the madness/of finally knowing who we are?” and “how do we sing a song that remembers the world into wholeness?”
