Some Were Just the Fragments // Es Que Fueron Solo Los Fragmentos - by Misael Osorio-Conde (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Misael Osorio-Conde's debut collection some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo unos Fragmentos center cultural, psychological, and linguistic border-crossings. Osorio-Conde's poems chart the experiences of his formative years where he learned to live in the shadows of exile as well as within a new language. Threading the needle between disclosure and acceptance, lyricism and narrative, and encapsulating new and inventive formal structures, the poems in some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo unos Fragmentos attempt to make sense of Osorio-Conde's crossing while grieving an indefinitely deferred return to his native land. The poems presented in this bilingual collection are built for our contemporary moment, while laced with the timeless realities, hardships, and most importantly, the successes, loves, family, and camaraderie that define human experience.

Review Quotes

"Miraculously, Misael Osorio-Conde, has found forms--and an innovatively wide range of them--for a poetry of desertion, a poetry of abandonment, of sand and desert, of blood, of confusion. He has found forms for what is discarded, for garbage, for history and its terrors, for the illegible, for holes and wars, for suspension, for trains that 'drag robots form their entrails, ' for shapelessness, for thirst, stones and survival. He writes with a multilingual fire of language, where a self-translation is never as simple as it seems because it has 'no known original.' 'Boiling with snow, ' the Fragments/los Fragmentos is a poetry of continuous movement and the exhaustion and pain that comes with it. It's an astonishingly powerful debut collection from a writer who is changing the art and language of migration." --Daniel Borzutsky, The Murmuring Grief of the Americas

"Like Cesar Vallejo, his most obvious predecessor, Misael Osorio-Conde writes poetry that moves, vibrates, transforms. As Emerson wrote to Whitman, 'This book makes me happy the way a great power makes one happy.'" --Johannes Göransson, The New Quarantine

"In his debut collection, Misael Osorio-Conde slashes along the page with a bilingual tongue, dreams us through disaster, and honors the bones bundled along la frontera. Fed by memory, he gathers wisdom that emerges from the aching to go back and writes to outlast desperation, hunger, and silence, declaring, 'still here / alive / figures in / a land smeared.' This beautiful book of sandblasted poems evokes thirst and then quenches it with an ocean of powerful sparks." --Juan J. Morales, author of Dream of the Bird Tattoo

"In some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo los Fragmentos, Misael Osorio-Conde conjures what he calls fuges: fugues and fugas--poetic flights that unravel quickly and sweep through everything like a dust storm. In this collection, Spanish and English do not simply translate into one another. They diverge across pages like the slippage of memory. They haunt, as ghosts do, in the shadows of who and what survives. Each body is an archive of what the border and the state try to erase. Osorio-Conde offers the desert as threshold, wound, village, a monumental burial ground. Sand is endless here; it is breath, and from its air the bones rise to speak-- living and dead in perpetual dialogue. This is a shattering, feverish, and bold debut: 'look at all that grass growing / from the mountains made with our garbage.' Osorio-Conde offers not elegy but proof. Fragments endure, and the language refuses to settle or disappear, asking all of us 'entonces cual es su teoria de liberacion?'" --Angela Peñaredondo, nature felt but never apprehended

About the Author

Misael Osorio-Conde is a poet and translator currently living in the Midwest. He earned his MFA at the University of Notre Dame and is currently enrolled in the Program for Writers at University of Illinois, Chicago. In his work he attempts to capture the passage of language through the threshold of the body. He is interested in the traumas of crossing borders and how those traumas follow the language; interested in the marks those traumas leave inscribed in the psyche by their passage, and how memory helps us to reconstruct our humanity. Osorio-Conde's work has appeared in Protean Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Texas Review, and elsewhere.