World Enough Writers Poetry Book Release Reading for Raúl Sánchez & C.W. Emerson

Vital voices Raúl Sánchez & C.W. Emerson read from their World Enough Writer poetry collections. Raúl Sánchez writes of his culture and experience as a Mexican immigrant, writes of family and literature. C.W.'s collection speaks of beauty, connection, and tragedy throughout the height of the AIDs epidemic. He writes of innocence tarnished by loss. In Raúl Sánchez’s When We Were Water, selections from his books All Our Brown-Skinned Angels and When There Were No Borders travel to us with abundant new work that continues to experiment in forms and shapes, with odes and acrostic poems, visions and flashbacks, elegies and spirit-journeys, but always with humor and human vitality and a golden thread connecting to Latin roots. This work is free and playful, jazzy and up close, exploding with intensity. These are questing poems, liberation poems, devotional poems, ecstatic poems, comic poems, sincere and lived and opening out. —Douglas Cole, author of The Cabin at the End of the World Luminous Body, Glittering Ash: This is a poignant, fine-wrought book of poise and lamentation—by turns, erotic, austere, and lyrical—with a keen attention to natural beauty. Its centerpiece poems, “The Impossible Time” and “Coldwater Canyon Suite,” convey the saga of what it meant to be young, gallant, and compass-less in the shocking early years of the AIDS epidemic. Emerson’s intrepid survivor’s task, his elegiac portraiture and vivid witness pierce us out of necessity. —Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas and author of The World That the Shooter Left Us