A Free Monthly Online Lecture Series from WritingWorkshops.com & Gemini Ink

Wednesday, February 19th, 2025, via Zoom@ 7PM CST (Add to Cart to RSVP for Free)

Up Next: A conversation with Octavio Quintanilla, to discuss his new book, Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press); moderated by Monique Quintana.

“‘I want to think where I’m going will be free of borders,’ Quintanilla writes. These poems—informed by an artist’s eye, the art shifted by a poet’s vision—refuse to ignore thresholds, strange angles, and blockades. We lodge in tight corners and find prayers emerge from line and shadow.”
—Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of In Old Sky: Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon

“Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours pushes against itself and ruptures the poetic grids inhabited by beasts, storms, scarecrows, black cows, neighbors digging graves at night, and poems that dismantle the physical and psychological structure of our realities. It invites us to confront our own mortality, and bears witness to the testimonies of rage and hope tattooed on our flesh/spirit.”
—Elizabeth Torres, winner of the 2022 Ambroggio Prize for Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes

“With alacrity and wit, the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum.”
—Norma E. Cantú, author of Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers

In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.

Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker’s secret thoughts. Haunted by loss—of parents, of children, of the self—the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: “[A]nd sometimes it’s hard to know / on which side of the river I stand.” Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.

Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.

Poet Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows. He served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, Texas. Octavio is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera and the founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. Octavio holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

Moderator Monique Quintana is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has been supported by Yaddo, The Community of Writers, Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Storyknife. You can find her at moniquequintana.com

RSVP BY ADDING TO CART

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• Critically Acclaimed Novelist David Samuel Levinson: Tell Me How This Ends Well
• Award-Winning writer Antonio Ruiz-Camacho's Barefoot Dogs
• San Antonio Poet Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson's She Lives in Music
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• Amanda Eyre Ward's New York Times bestselling novel The Jetsetters
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• Octavio Quintanilla, If I Go Missing
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• Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
• Mike Soto, A Grave is Given Supper
• Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven
• Johnnie Bernhard, Sisters of the Undertow
• Wondra Chang, Sonju
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• Laurie Ann Guerrero, I Have Eaten The Rattlesnake
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