Tropicalia

Emma Trelles is the winner of the 2010 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, the recipient of a Green Eyeshade Award for art criticism, and a regular contributor to the Best American Poetry blog. She is the author of the chapbook Little Spells. She lives with her husband in South Florida, where she teaches and writes about visual art, books, and culture.

"It is rare when a book is both thought provoking and tantalizes the senses. Emma Trelles's Tropicalia is one such book. . . . True to the multi-faceted arts movement for which it is named, Trelles's words evoke various degrees of citrus, bloom, and color." —Gently Read Literature"Trelles brings Tropicalia back to poetry not with the use of typography but with vivid concrete imagery. . . . [T]he poems display a lush and sonorous language; music is not so much evoked as created." —World Literature Today"In Tropicalia, Emma Trelles gives us Miami—the flora, the fauna, the languages, the interstate. Her poems are luxurious and scrumptious, socially relevant, with oomph and sizzle. The buoyancy of her images and the poignancy of her direct language make Trelles the most exciting poet to emerge recently from the state with the prettiest name." —Denise Duhamel"'Everything looks better in a poem, / or worse, depending on how much of the day you were able / to hoard'—That's a typical flash of wisdom from a poet who is herself a hoarder of images, a beautifier of the Miami streets she lyrically documents. I love the immediacy and gusto of Tropicalia. I am thankful that it is 'thankful to be standing / in the heat watching egrets.' The world may not always 'look better' in Emma Trelles's poems, but it is a better place for all lovers of poetry, thanks to her rich and heartfelt book." —Campbell McGrath"True to the musical movement of its namesake, Tropicalia is a unique fusion of sounds, sights, and textures that entrances the reader into a dream-state. Like a déjà vu of the soul, the physical and emotional landscapes these poems render so precisely feel at once familiar and yet like completely new worlds in which I find love, meaning, and resolve for the first time, again. 'Beauty is better felt than seen,' Trelles writes, and it is true: Tropicalia is not a book I merely read, but felt word by word; not poems I merely pondered, but experienced syllable after precious syllable." —Richard Blanco"In the poem "Nocturne in Parts," Trelles writes "There is something all-powerful and holy/ about a cold orange. Imagine peeling/ each day into one flawless strip." This gorgeous description of how the divine may perceive the passing of time is convincing, yet false when considering the fruit that is this fibrous and sweet debut collection of poems. Amid interstates and wet grass, saints and devils, protests and surrenders, Trelles exists as an eye—a recurring image in the collection—giving credence to a Florida alien and true. Rather than a contiguous peel, this collection is more like the pile of bright rinds one finds between their feet after feeding ravenously." —Kyle G. Dargan, author of Logorrhea Dementia: A Self-Diagnosis