Through the Lens (Volume 16)

Reviews / Votes

"I view strong ekphrastic poetry as that which moves well beyond description and, instead, engages with, via conversation, correspondence, or riff, another work of art, so I admire how Moro-Gronlier's poems in this collection interact with visual art (and her expanded field of collector's items, songs, landscapes, and other texts) in nuanced and inventive ways. With titles like 'Please Don't Touch the Art, Let the Art Touch You.' and 'Macho as Object, as Still Life, as Portrait,' these poems ask us to look more carefully, see differently, and investigate perception itself. Their crisp, often kinetic images invite us to dive in, and their pitch perfect internal music calls us to swim in the currents of her cadences. Beyond ekphrastic, these are also queer poems, feminist poems whose women-a new mother struggling to breastfeed, school girls who eschew their home economics assignments to create art installations, a queer wife who must walk away from her husband, a 'fat chick' who is anything but desperate-embrace and reveal both their fierce independence and their complex vulnerabilities as they "walk along the welcome mat of coal, strike a match." -Brenda Cardenas, author of Trace and 2025-2027 Wisconsin Poet Laureate

"In Through the Lens, Miami-Dade Poet Laureate Caridad Moro-Gronlier employs her considerable craft and admirable analytical skills to bend and blur the boundaries of ekphrasis. As an eyewitness to everything from the portraits on silver dollars to swans who swim in a hotel lobby, from historical houses to Dolly Parton songs played in Paris, she uses a powerful blend of personal experience and reflection to reinvent both the definition of art and what it means. 'I want to know / the rooted scar / beneath the rose,' she writes in 'Macho as Object, as Still Life, as Portrait,' a poem after A Blind Eye, a painting by Carlos Rancano. She probes that wound throughout this thought-provoking work via a variety of viewpoints, voices, and techniques that range from self-portrait to anaphora to epistolary. In 'Aboard the Nepenthe,' industrialist James Deering's yacht, Moro-Gronlier writes, 'I kept a tally of all I forgot,' and we the readers are the beneficiaries of this benevolent memorial, we borrow the poet's 'strength required to break through the ground,' we become by extension the grateful minders of the instruction: "Please Don't Touch the Art, Let the Art Touch You." -Jen Karetnick, author of Inheritance with a High Error Rate

"A worthy follow-up to her groundbreaking debut book, Tortillera, this collection of ekphrastic poems trains a sharp lens on the rich landscapes and narratives of other artistic influences. When the shutter clicks, the images that emerge are more self-affirmation than homage, snapshots of a personal history pared down to its most basic truths. There is a fresh sensibility at play here, with poems that are 'more skin than armor,' where the captured moment embodies the larger issues of authenticity and identity. This small, intimate book offers a bold poetic voice coming into its own, fearless, transformative, and endlessly resilient." -Silvia Curbelo, author of Falling Landscape

"In Through the Lens, Moro-Gronlier has created a poetry collection that revels in the hidden majesties encoded in the everyday and the examined past through poetic experiments that result in the discovery of delight in art, landscape and recovered memory. Observations in which a life lived is transmuted by patience and clear-seeing into poems of grace and intimacy-look closely and your own life may take on new meaning." -Dan Vera, author of Speaking Wiri Wiri and The Space Between Our Danger and Delight