By guest blogger poet Kara Candito, author of Spectator and Taste of Cherry

Excerpt from Dolores Dorantes, Style/Estilo, translated by Jen Hofer, Kenning Editions, 2016

14.—Give us a bottle and let’s be done with your world. Light us up and the fire will spread like a plague. We arrive at your office. At your machine. We arrive at your teacher’s chair. At that world that is no longer the world. Where nothing touches and we kiss each other. We join our girlish lips damp with some kind of fuel. Give us a forest. Give us the presidency.

Lately, for reasons that seem too obvious and exhaustive to name, I’ve been drawn to poetic imagery that annihilates the normative world. Cast as a plural feminine address to a “you” that is an embodiment of totalitarian power, the sections of Dolores Dorantes’ Style/Estilo are comprised of recurring images that ignite one another. Here, the flames from the female speakers’ bodies (elsewhere referred to as a “cluster of girls”) light up the violent order of an oppressor’s world—his office, machine, and teacher’s chair. They become the paradox of a combustible kiss in a space where nothing touches. I cannot un-see the absolute vulnerability of the girls’ girlish lips, which turn the language of violent domination against itself. Like any irreducible poetic image, the flame-making girlish lips reach in many directions at once, towards the effacement of speech and sex, and also the radical, redemptive burning of a world that is no longer the world. Indeed, the image of these lips becomes an imperative that insists upon the radiance of a burning forest, a burning presidency.