"I will call the voice of this poet a 'common' voice... a voice a poet
could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing." --Philip
Levine, Ploughshares
This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores
love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans
and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices--of all the people,
places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are
the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to
the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every
living thing.
From Patient Zero
Love is a worried, old heart
disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff
blues are made of, real blues
that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk
like the "Okra blues" or "Pay Day blues,"
though I think House would agree
two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,
if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog
bitten in two by the neighbor's dog, all of which
makes me wonder about the source of our disease
and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam
and Eve left the garden?...
Tomás Q. Morín's debut poetry collection A Larger Country was the
winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance
of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of
Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Texas State University and
in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
