BRIDGE BOOKS: Natasha Mijares: “violent wave”
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The torrential inputs of sensations, forms of matter, literary references, and ecologies of being that feed Mijares’ practice have come pouring out in a violent wave. As a poet, Mijares’ skill of holding a sparse page with potency is captivating. Mijares uses mimesis to move through worlds and push readers into ripples of quiet overwhelm. Her work reaches towards a tangle of words caught in the throat, conjured up by waves of experiential inputs ranging from earthworms to the interstate. This collection is a celebration of interrelationships delicately crafted on the page.
The lines in this collection perform the action of a violent wave—separating and crashing into the air, the emptiness, the unsettled earth. The collection, like water, attempts to contain everything in its path for inquiry, understanding, and meditation. This book-length poem enlivens a myriad of voices as they negotiate their space, their language, and their nature, which, as a work, seeks to settle into the belief that change is constant.
“In this book-length poem, a calm horizon swells into a wild symphony,” says Mijares. “Violent wave is a meditation on human and non-human animals and the environment’s complex needs, desires, beauties, and dangers. A landscape for the reader to explore, my debut invites the reader to slowly wade through ways of being.”
"Natasha Mijares' violent wave is a stunning meditation on the interconnectedness of human and non-human worlds—a text that moves fluidly between fragmentation and vivid sensory detail, much like one of my favorite volumes, Czesław Miłosz's Road-side Dog," says Bridge Books Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Michael Workman. "Her poetic structure evokes Miłosz’s mastery of the fragment, conjuring images that are as fleeting as they are resonant. In lines such as 'i am thinking of a way of saying angel with my feet,’ Mijares’ sparse yet electric language detonates across the page, revealing a ritualistic sense of space and dislocation reminiscent of Miłosz’s own explorations of liminality."
"In violent wave, Mijares pushes the reader to linger in the white spaces between phrases, to swim in the undercurrents of thought. Much like Miłosz, she thrives on the tension between fragmentation and continuity, drawing us through shifting states of perception—from the microscopic to the mythic. Lines like 'geese take over a baseball field, there is so much food' and 'hitting angels with my fists until I lose my color' illustrate her capacity to distill vast emotional landscapes into singular, powerful moments. Mijares' debut is both a landscape and a journey, inviting the reader to wade through its depths and surface profoundly changed."
