Like Bismuth When I Enter

"Phrases, sentences, lines, and fragments scintillate and spark with multiple realities. Lara has risked a great deal to transcend sense and form as we understand it to make a remarkably fresh and majestic book. I feel returned to the primordial, the preclassical, the prelingual. Stein wanted to make words new; Lara has picked up the mission and carried it far."—Kazim Ali, Judge’s Citation for Nightboat Books Poetry Prize

"Carlos Lara’s Like Bismuth When I Enter consists of language that transmutes itself as a quantum hawk flying through non-sequential fractures of existence. His lingual exploration teems with the uncanny as it explores random planes such as a 'numb Serengeti of drool,' all the while 'approving of love and life.' Via tangential subversion, Lara’s language expresses the genuine pedigree of the poetic act."—Will Alexander

"Some poets think beauty is truth; others think truth—bare, odd, arbitrary, unrestrained—is beautiful. Carlos Lara falls in with the latter. Poems of such poets are often called 'difficult.' But what if difficulty wrote its own book of poems, about what you think of it and how that makes it feel? Well, Lara read that book and then wrote this one, answering difficulty’s prayer for itself: Show me to be 'real life true freedom'—'not explained yet that is also beauty.'"—Jessica Laser

"Realizing an abstract freedom opposed the determinism of everyday life, Lara’s poetry has an intrinsic social value. With an epigraph that reads 'for my grandfathers,' he sets the tone for a book of origins, only these origins point back to a multicultural, inter-traditional history, and then encircle the present moment like a warm sirocco wind. Lara’s linguistic consciousness is less a juxtaposition of phrases in the form of collage than a kind of attentive listening that discovers harmonic connections between disparate conceptual planes."—Jeffrey Grunthaner, Hyperallergic

"Like Bismuth When I Enter shows a technician at work on the aesthetic forces of production, an enthusiast laboring under the rusty hood of Surrealism."—Austin Carder, Caesura Magazine

"Lara’s work—aggressively gorgeous; confident—possesses a syntax (& voice), that despite its brazen eccentricity, we associate w reason."—Tourniquet Review

"Like Bismuth When I Enter is an urgent undoing of sense and syntax, an epistemology of disruption, a move toward a lawlessness of language. Surrealistic or post-surrealistic, fast-paced, not quite humorous, not quite tragic, fully felt and full of oddly affective new imageries and juxtapositions, the book invites the reader to reread past, present, and future micro and macro worlds differently, disparately, and spontaneously."—Jason Magabo Perez, Ploughshares