Oyster Saloon - by Desirée Alvarez (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Poetry that considers art, family history, and creativity.

This collection charts the life of an artist and her passion for nature through the making of a painting. Poems revel in the space humans occupy within the natural world, considering ways of living that range from harmonious to extractive. Alvarez reflects on petroleum, plastic, robots, monsters, and a swath of art history and family history--from her Latino father's time working as an artist in Andy Warhol's Factory to the teachings of Hokusai. Acting asa séance conjuring the voices of the dead as a guide, the book is part elegy to the poet's mother, who was a painter and gardener. Steeped in the rural New England countryside of the poet's childhood and the lore of her indigenous ancestral family in Puerto Rico and Mexico, Oyster Saloon straddles contrasting heritage and landscapes and considers what it means to live a creative life.

Review Quotes

"Oyster Saloon is interwoven strands of beauty. It is poems about nature, love, loss, and gratitude. It is watercolors that extend the reach of the poems. It is the pleasurable feeling that you recognize something without really knowing what it is. Alvarez gives us a way of seeing relationships and nature, both of which are ever changing."

"Alvarez writes luminous oysters that grow right off the page and into your thoughts and eyeballs! Deftly conjuring the invisible 'cosmic crochet'--cosmic reef!--that connects every living being across space and time, breath and body, 'ether and earth, ' Oyster Saloon charts the journey of a poet who travels through the valley of death and comes out 'circling the success of time, / ringing. O this tree full of bells / wild. O she too would sing'--We all will now!"