[03/01/25] Statman, Mark: Volverse/Volver

Lavender Ink / Diálogos, paperback

Publication Date: March 1, 2025

Publisher Marketing: Volverse/Volver (Becoming/Return) is the third of Mark Statman's metaphysical, lyrical Mexican books, one in which he "addresses our historical moment, his dual life in Mexico and the U.S., and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world." (Jesse Lee Kercheval). The exile and home of the hechizo worlds deepen with weight and counterweights, liberations and deliberations, of life, death, landscape and breath.In this haunting, vivid new collection, Volverse/ Volver, Mark Statman addresses our historical moment, his dual life in Mexico and the U.S., and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Becoming and returning, Statman moves through grief and loss towards a renewal in a book charged with exultation and tenderness. —Jesse Lee Kercheval

Begin with "song dance" and you fly at once enchanted, and if it's a dance with apples peaches pears Buddha and hallelujah choruses, which Mark Statman gives us, how can one not stand up and look at the sky, the stars, the universe, as one has never seen before? This book is a cosmos book, or at least the world through a constant shifting and moving of language through "sun worship / and rain." It doesn't explain it all to us, but takes us there, opens our senses. A gift of "lives lived," of "contradictions of philosophy," of belief that our roads lead somewhere, our stories ("subtle without logic") are imaginations beyond what we had imagined. Not that all is fruit and roses, for sometimes bodies of our loved ones, not well, make us aware of ends, of the end. But because of the gifts we know, when time calls us, "we'll be there," knowing and saying the names of the angels and saints. So come along, "out the door," "come with come / along come gone." Don't miss this gorgeous book of amazement in this and "countless worlds." Go and gone . . . and come back. —Charles Alexander

Arriba, en la montaña, bajo el cielo de Monte Albán, la voz del poeta nombra el valle: identifica las cosas y a los dioses de su nuevo hogar. Lo sucedido antes, fuera de un mundo percibido en otro idioma, el español, no queda atrás, entra plenamente en el paisaje. Volverse/Volver reconcilia el ayer y el presente con la naturalidad de un trueno. Con este libro, de poderosa nostalgia, el poeta Mark Statman nos deja ver que lo sagrado palpita en el tiempo, y en toda cotidianidad. —Araceli Mancilla Zayas