Reviews:
“Powerfully filmic, ingeniously constructed.”
Constance Hansen, Harvard Review
“López Medin’s commitment to recovering remnants of the past results in a moving suite of prose poems and lineated poems, along with photos and drawings — all intricately tracing her own matrilineage, domestic work, and disability. Sewing and its ritualistic labor function nimbly in many of these poems as a figure for poetic fabrication. Here we witness the poet’s persistent laboring to comprehend and, ultimately, to honor her mother as we dwell on these statements that turn and fold into one another, suspended in a kind of temporal uncertainty or lyric time, in a poem that never ends.”
Molly Bendall, Los Angeles Review of Books
“López Medin’s hybrid collection is a brilliant exploration of family history and the documentary fragment. Bridging poetry, prose, and image, Poem That Never Ends enacts the silences and fissures, vulnerabilities and intimacies within domestic spaces…A beautiful rendering of what is torn away from the familial past.”
“An outstanding collection. It reminds me of the best work by Anne Carson. Poem That Never Ends is a brave and confident book that brilliantly fuses genres, literary forms and languages to create a tour de force.”
“López Medin writes of physical, emotional and temporal distances she wishes to travel; of cognitive distance. She writes of connection and disconnection. This is such a remarkable book, and the ease of her prose is enviable. I keep having to hold back quoting page upon page.”
“Poem That Never Ends is a fascinating and beautiful work that shapes a narrative about López Medin’s familial past, present, and future. Using poetry, prose, and image, she builds a way to look at her mother and herself – and thus a model for how we all can shape our understanding of our own identities. Like the cut pieces of fabric her mother used to assemble clothing, López Medin uses scraps and bits of language, memory, and image to create something entirely new.”
Tasslyn Magnusson, Mom Egg Review
“Poem That Never Ends is a study of loss, multiplicity, and containment in terms of form, language, and content. Nestled in the liminal spaces that live between prose and poem, Spanish and English, image and text, and between generations, it is a book that satisfies the head as much as the heart. It continues to evolve for me through multiple readings, and I’m grateful that in this way, it indeed “never ends.””
Amanda Moore, Women’s Voices for Change
“Continuing the cinematic and visual palettes of Excursion, López Medin explores ontological division as its own modality, rather than a rupture which needs suturing. The poem never ends because the edge is always expectant, always waiting for something to be added to it…It is the poetry of what Michel de Certeau called “quoted fragments” that persists, adding the energy of incompleteness, an intimacy that gestures towards continuance and possibility so that the text, itself, evinces the “resonances” of a touched body. When Medin speaks of her motherhood, and all our motherhoods, “lost in a dominant nameless motherhood,” we are given the opportunity to see one another through them.”
Alina Stefanescu, Cleveland Review of Books
“Its true beauty is in López Medin’s lyric prose and stunning poems. As readers, we must create a story not only from what is on the page, but also what is missing.”
Rebecca Valley, Drizzle Review
“López Medin shows it is possible to create new patterns, new ways of seeing.”
Selected by Ching-In Chen as a winner of the Essay Press-University of Washington Bothell Contest
Sparked by the only two letters —out of over a hundred—that López Medin’s mother saved from her own mother in Paraguay, POEM THAT NEVER ENDS weaves together poems and family photos to explore the fragmentation of time, memory, and mother-child relationships. Fragments, family hearing impairments, ripped-up letters, and living and writing between languages point to the inescapable holes in language, troubling the notion of a finite utterance. Layering elements of painting, cinema, and the elusive three dimensions of theater into the weave, Poem That Never Ends traces a sequence of mothers—López Medin’s mother, her mother’s mother, herself as a mother—in a porous, restless gesture toward what’s never fully grasped.
“The mental fabric of lines and ellipses, of temporal creases, abridgments, places and dates is traced against the physical materiality of images, of letters, cloth, photographs and drawings, and in that tracing reminds us that meaning cannot occur without words. In Poem That Never Ends, we glimpse pieces of a familial history, a “reaching to confirm what’s been forgotten,” only to affirm whatever fragments remain present and alive. Fragments are stitched to other fragments to make new wholes. The personal intersects and informs the historical; seeing intersects and informs hearing; one language breaches and breathes into another. “The circle becomes a hole, we are inside it, my family and I. Surrounded by the events, though on the surface untouched.” This is a stunning and deeply moving book.”
— ANN LAUTERBACH
“In López Medin’s Poem That Never Ends, the crosswise threads overlay each other, loosely intertwined to build a tensile logic of lineage, time that’s come and gone, and generational edges. Our understanding of what constitutes the edge of anything forever shifts and in time, the selvage becomes the center and the center drifts too. There is a spectral glow in these pieces that reach and keep reaching. They don’t reach to stake a claim or to grasp. They reach to hold the fragments and offer a pliable, possible extension. Through it all, the mother, the mother’s mothers, the sons, and their fractious looped landscapes haunt us in this collection that opens a window, cracks a door. Both the door and the window stay open.”
— ASIYA WADUD
“Through fragments and short sections (prose, poem, neither, both) that can (but shouldn’t) be pieced together into a kind of reckoning with motherhood, Poem That Never Ends places hereditary loss of hearing and linguistic barriers next to their common responses—leaning in to ears, reading lips—forcing the reader to reckon with any desire they may have to know the whole story. I have been haunted for months by an after-tone of Silvina López Medin’s Zoom-mediated voice reading the titular “Poem That Never Ends, ”an intimate, mysterious experience that returned as I read the book and left me wanting to whisper in everyone’s ear, Read this.”
— ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS
Read excerpts at Hyperallergic, LitHub, and Poetry Daily.
Watch a video where I’m reading from the book.
Read an interview at Latin American Literature Today.
Poem That Never Ends featured on Book Marks.