Where Else But Here

Alejandro Escudé

First Day of La Escuela

Alone, a mast of a wrecked ship, I wept
And to my knees I held my head. I could
Not eat, I hadn’t slept, and no one would
Explain, nor qualify, the fear I felt.
The natives laughed, their distance fully kept,
Or so I sensed; perhaps they only looked.
Some spoke in words I knew; I thought I could
Respond. My life was in a word, my breath.

My fluent aunt then roared that day;
The principal, a man, all smiles, despite
His own mistake, could only recommend
The different class, then blush, and look away.
Soon after this, I shivered in the light
Of seizures that felt like copulating death.

ISBN 1-59661-028-X 40 pages/$9
With poignant optimism and a winsome sensibility, Alejandro Escudé animates the contemporary sonnet with a tough new poetics. A boy, displaced from his native country, grows through a family’s caring unity into a politically savvy man in this attractive progression. Escudé’s details have what he identifies as the warmth that shivers. The speaker’s character is indelibly part of the art.
—Sandra McPherson

Alejandro Escudé’s often poignant and always accomplished collection explores the pain of dislocation implicit in the “immigrant’s unsolvable question”— “Do I belong to this?”—and finally locates itself with sureness and grace in a country of the mind, “the isle of books” where the poet searches for “the poem/that begins like a searchlight through the fog.” This is an impressive debut.
—Sandra M. Gilbert

Alejandro Escudé’s sonnet sequence, “The Immigrant’s Question” reminds us that as “immigration” is always a story of unique families, “formalism” is, or should be an adventure of unique poets. This is a debut of a deeply playful, deeply serious young writer, from whom much is to be expected.
—Alan Williamson

Alejandro J. Escudé is originally from Códoba, Argentina. He holds a master’s degree in English from U.C. Davis, and he works as a high school teacher in Los Angeles. In 2003, he won the U.C. Poet Laureate Prize. He has been writing poetry since the age of fifteen.