We Borrowed Gentleness

J. Estanislao Lopez

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781948579377
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope. By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• A Metaphor
• Independence Day in West Texas
• Little Words
• The Contract
• Promise
• The Politics of Rivers
• Let’s Not Get Carried Away
• Theodicy Written in the Occupied Sands
• Diáspora
• Alternate Ending: Solomon’s Misjudgment
• Laredo Duplex
• The Offering
• Patterns
• A Miracle
• Elegy in the Absence of Answers
• My Uncle’s Killer
• Porvenir
• The New Regime
• The Framework of an Imaginary Nation
• Like It Is
• Alternate Ending: The Unrecorded Bitterness of Abraham
• Knowing Children
• Dream of God as a Venture Capitalist
• Anti-Ode to the Metaphysical
• The Ghosts of My Past Are in Disrepair
• Living in the Moment
• Alternate Ending: The Invention of Science
• Reasons to Despise Being Literary
• The Family Endures Magritte’s Revisions of La Chambre d’Écoute
• How to Confront the Past
• Erik Estrada Defends His Place in the Canon
• Intelligent Design
• Erosion
• -ism
• False Cognates
• Speaking Ill of the Dead
• Elegy with No Tenor
• Elongations
• The Vestigial
• The Untranslatable
• The Aphids
• Astrophysics
• Alternate Ending: The Escape of Jephthah’s Daughter
• Meditation on the Last Prayer
• The Interval
• Pastoral
• A Man’s Apology
• The Word
• Meditation on Beauty
• The Burning Field
• A Force Equal to the Weight of the Fluid Displaced
• The Maker
• Alternate Beginning: The Sixth Day
• Places with Terrible Wi-Fi
• Static
• In Praise of Weakness
• At Last, Surrender
• Acknowledgments
• Recent Titles from Alice James Books