Thresholes - by Lara Mimosa Montes (Paperback)

About the Book

In elegiac and fervent poetry, Lara Mimosa Montes writes across the thresholds of fracture, trauma, violence, and identity.

Book Synopsis

In elegiac and fervent language, Lara Mimosa Montes writes across the thresholds of fracture, trauma, violence, and identity.

THRESHOLES is both a doorway and an absence, a road map and a remembering. In this almanac of place and memory, Lara Mimosa Montes explores the passage of time, returning to the Bronx of the '70s and '80s and the artistry that flourished there. What is the threshold between now and then, and how can the poet be the bridge between the two? Just as artists of that time highlighted what was missing in the Bronx, this collection examines what is left open in the wake of trauma and loss.

Review Quotes

Praise for THRESHOLES

A Paris Review Contributors' Favorite Book of 2020
A Ms. Magazine Best Poetry of 2020
A Refinery29 Best New Book of 2020
A Latin Post Must Read Book by Latin Authors in 2020

"The circles, the titular 'thresholes, ' mark the thresholds between fragments. . . . In Montes's work, these labels seem to say, don't skip the white space-the gaps between language are part of the language." --Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

"I felt as though I was being beckoned into the book's orbit. . . . I can't wait to read it again." --Aisha Sabatini Sloan, The Paris Review

"[A] drifting, yet driven, meditation on grief and healing. . . . THRESHOLES fearlessly explores what it means to come close to formlessness." --Rachel Carroll, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Alongside [Montes], we tunnel through a series of hollow points, pressure positions, aesthetic snapshots. . . . A taxonomy of holes, but also of their edges, where they end and meet" --Trisha Low, The Believer

"Montes graces us with a unique ability to foresee how time may empower artistic utterances through the breakage." --Kara Laurene Pernicano, Full Stop

"A book-length epic about trauma and loss." --Ruben Quesada, Harvard Review

"A book we need during this time. . . . an unleashing of our identities trapped between the past and our becoming." --Diane Seo Hyung Lee, Degree Critical

"[A] powerful, beautiful work. . . . some kind of ancient universal equation that brings Montes to a place where she can traverse time and space and other once-meaningful boundaries, all in order to tell her story. It's a story of the Bronx of the '70s and '80s, and of the body and art, of entrances and exits, of life." --Refinery29

"THRESHOLES is a training manual for grief and desire. In this powerful and beautiful work, absence becomes an artifact, the only thing we get to touch." --Bhanu Kapil

"Lara Mimosa Montes is the powerhouse these troubled times need. A true heir of Marguerite Duras and Clarice Lispector, Montes writes with ferocious intellectual energy and emotional pungency, and she never takes the cautious path." --Wayne Koestenbaum

"Lara Mimosa Montes interrupts genre/gentrification in a thrilling book that brings to bear the notion of a 'body I can in language throw, ' a most welcome disruption to lyric autofiction modalities." --Carmen Giméeacute;nez Smith

About the Author

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer based in Minneapolis and New York. Her poems and essays have appeared in Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, BOMB, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, Jacket2, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow and CantoMundo Fellow. She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Currently, she works as a senior editor of Triple Canopy. She was born in the Bronx.