Rivera, Sara Daniele: The Blue Mimes

Graywolf Press, paperbackPublication Date: April 2, 2024Publisher Marketing: Sara Daniele Rivera's award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone—all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition. Rivera's poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English—between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themsel