This highly praised collection explores the disparity between promises and reality, especially as seen from the vantage point of the Hispanic Americans from the time of Columbus to the present.
Promesas: Geography of the Impossible is Gloria Vando’s long-awaited first book of poems, a reunion of some of the complex and fully realized works that have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She received the 1991 Billee Murray Denny Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 1992 Walt Whitman Poetry Context and the 1989 Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award.
Winner, 16th Annual Thorpe Menn Award for Literary Achievement in 1994
“This collection introduces a newcomer whose voice is particularly sustained and developed. Vando’s is a universal voice expressing childhood anguish and passion.”
—Publishers Weekly
“…these intense poems explode like flares above a battlefield of the heart to reveal a geography of the impossible.”
—Library Journal
“The poet’s unflinching look at her personal history, and the chronicle of her patria, her island home’s realities and myths, give this book a moral authority, a vision of a multicultural world made rich by Vando’s artistry and intelligence. Here is significant and memorable work, and I salute it.”
—Colette Inez
“The poet’s quest roams the Americas and beyond on a journey far past mere physical landscapes and the framing narratives. These are poems to haunt and reverberate for a very long time.”
—David Ray
“A pleasure to welcome Gloria Vando into the company of poets spirited, bittersweet, adventurous.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks
GLORIA VANDO is editor of The Helicon Nine Reader, the renowned literary magazine of women’s arts and letters. Currently, she publishes Helicon Nine Editions from Kansas City where she lives with her husband Bill Hickok. She has three grown children from a previous marriage: Lorca, Paul and Anika Peress. She received the 1991 Billee Murray Denny Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 1992 Walt Whitman Poetry Contest and the 1989 Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award.
