The Palace - by Andrés Cerpa (Paperback)

About the Book

"From Puerto Rico to mythological forests, 'The Palace' charts a family's journey to build a life and home in a world of violence and economic collapse, by confronting ghosts and gods, memory and time; The Palace is a testament to splendor and transformation. From Puerto Rico to mythological forests, 'The Palace' charts a family's journey to build a life and home in a world of violence and economic collapse. Amidst real and imagined landscapes the narrator confronts the specters of his ancestors and ancient gods as the family traverses torn villas and labyrinths. Despite a turbulent history scarred by violence, disenfranchisement, and addiction, a path emerges toward redemption through a deep engagement with love and the natural world. The Palace is a testament of love and transformation, a journey toward splendor in a despairing world"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

From Puerto Rico to mythological forests, The Palace charts a family's journey to build a life and home in a world that is often violent and rife with economic instability, as the speaker must also confront his own turbulent past and strive to imagine new ways forward.

Amidst real and imagined landscapes the narrator confronts the specters of his ancestors and ancient gods as the family traverses torn villas and labyrinths. Despite a turbulent history scarred by violence, disenfranchisement, and addiction, a path emerges toward redemption through the speaker's deep engagement with love and the natural world. Still, throughout the speaker grapples with his understanding of change: what can we, and what can't we expect to leave behind in life? What does it mean to move on, to grow?

Marked by solitude and inquisition, the poems of The Palace note the physical nature of their existence as a vehicle for exploring the spiritual. Featuring recurring motifs of the labyrinth, addiction, fecundity, fragility, and future, Cerpa evokes the sense that one can move on from an environment or way of being in the world, but never from oneself. The Palace is a testament of love and transformation, a journey toward splendor in a despairing world.

Review Quotes

"I love these poems for the way their imagery touches the reader with a gentleness and capacious questioning mind. These labyrinthian poems that navigate memory, country, pain are stunning, original, and layered. Mostly, these poems feel true to me, not as in fact, but True."
--Victoria Chang, author of Obit

"Andrés Cerpa is that rarest of gifts: a poet who knows how to sing and tell a story, how to risk fragmentation and dare to be whole. The Palace is him at the height of his powers. Read this book, then read it again, and find in it the transcendence that can only come from going deep into the common, the real, the texture of being alive, in time."
--Joseph Fasano, author of The Magic Words

Previous praise for The Vault:

"A teacher once told me that a poem should be like a spider web--if you touch any part, the rest of it will tremble. This whole book feels like that."
--Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

About the Author

Andrés Cerpa is the author of two previous books of poetry, Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019) and The Vault (2021), which was longlisted for a National Book Award and celebrated as one of the best poetry books of 2021 by The New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is an educator and faculty member of the Randolph MFA Program.