Santana, Cintia: The Disordered Alphabet

Four Way Books, paperback

Publication Date: September 15, 2023

Publisher Marketing: Reckoning with the emotional anarchy of our lives, Cintia Santana's debut collection The Disordered Alphabet virtuosically bares the difficulty of wrangling experience into language or wrestling signification into sense. She surveys a cosmic crossroads, "the sluices of heaven wording as we [stand] in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning." These poems pay homage to inherited forms while fashioning their own shapes -- Santana writes in alliterative verse, in footnotes, in epistles to consonants and vowels, in ekphrasis, in thrall. Ranging from A to Z in style, subject, and mood, Santana's poetic encyclopedia chronicles life's ubiquitous elegies alongside the world's innumerable wonders -- true to jumbled experience, they arrive in no particular order, or in the particular order of all the time and all at once. If "let there be" enabled light, it released every other sublime liquid, for then also "there was lie. // Lapse. And lake. Luck and leap. Little by little. Letter by letter. And it was late. And there was bloom."