Episode 18 - Roberto Carlos Garcia's Elegies - A reading and conversation

Digging Through with Gessy Alvarez

Roberto Carlos Garcia reads selected works from his new collection, Elegies (Flower Song Press). He talks about remembrance, life during the pandemic, matriarchy, history, feminism, The Black Jacobins, and the challenges of communicating hope in spite of racism. Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. Roberto's third collection, [Elegies], is published by Flower Song Press and his second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books. Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press. He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books Publishing, A NonProfit Corp. "Garcia’s third poetry collection, [Elegies], centers on love, grief, legacy, racism and history. These lyric poems range from an ode to Allen Iverson’s crossover on Michael Jordan, to an original form called a ‘mixtape’ featuring lines from today’s most well-known poets, to a twenty-poem sequence of elegies dedicated to his grandmother, to an essay on police terror, to name a few. The poet explores the complexities of modern life and death through his clear, unflinching, embodied perspective." - For more about Roberto, visit: https://www.robertocarlosgarcia.com Intro and Closing Music Credits: John Sib for Pixabay. "Tropical House."