Eduardo C. Corral

Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He is the first Latino poet to win the competition. Guillotine (Graywolf Press) traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, the lingering scars of betrayal, the border itself, great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, Corral offers dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? In the sequence “Testaments Scratched into Water Station Barrels,” Corral’s seamlessly integrates Spanish and English. The poems curve around the surfaces upon which they are written, overlapping like graffiti left by those who may or may not have survived crossing the border. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called Guillotine “Devastating and electrifying […] Shot through with the dark realities of human tragedy, Corral’s latest is a virtuosic compendium of grief.”