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Poetic Voices Without Borders 2

Poetic Voices Without Borders 2

Robert L. Giron

Winner of the National Best Book Award for Fiction & Literature: Anthologies, sponsored by USA Book News - 2009

This international anthology of over 150 poets who write in English, French, and Spanish includes work by Grace Cavalieri, Rita Dove, Dana Gioia, Joy Harjo, Peter Klappert, Philip Levine, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gloria Vando, among many other fine poets. The voices are passionate and enlightening while echoing a desire in their own way to transform, to change, to transcend borders, be they personal, cultural or national, in a poetic manner as if to say that within literature there isn't a border for the human spirit, for it is that energy that keeps us going.

"The fence behind your house / is the zero border,' writes Martha Collins, but it's 'Hasta luego and over you go,' thus encapsulating the experience of the reader and many of the poets defining, challenging, and redefining the idea of borders in the multicultural, multilingual anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 by Gival Press....


These poets, among 150 others in this collection encompassing nearly 300 poems, erect and dismantle borders in lingual, cultural, national, and personal terms....


[The] desire to cross boundaries, to transform and eradicate them—'as if to say that within literature there isn't a border for the human spirit'—is the commonality narrowing this wide arc to its flexible focus, and the stated goal of editor Robert L. Giron in his introduction....


Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 is a tool to affect passage through these arbitrary boundaries. It is a literary passport for traveling beyond imposed limits, and one to keep close for handy reference, for as Collins assures us, 'You crossed the border hours ago.'


—Chip Livingston


Robert L. Giron

Robert L. Giron is the grandson of the late Casimiro E. (ès Monge) Giron, musician, composer, and conductor of his orchestra, and the great grandson of a pioneer of San Angelo, Texas, who ran his own stagecoach service between El Paso (formerly El Paso del Norte), San Angelo, and San Antonio before railroads arrived in West Texas. His family roots go back four centuries in what is now the USA. In addition to having Comanche and Mexican/Spanish roots on the maternal side of his family, he has paternal lineage to the houses of Spain (Osuna / Sevilla) and France (Lorraine). Giron holds a B.A. degree from the University of Texas at El Paso where he studied linguistics and foreign languages; he later did post graduate work in creative writing with José Antonio Villarreal, Jon Manchip White, and the late Raymond Carver. He also holds a master's from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and later studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor under a Mellon Fellowship and has spent two summers at Selwyn College studying literature at the University of Cambridge International Summer Programme in Cambridge, England. Giron, a native of Nebraska, thinks of himself as a transplanted Texan who currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. He is the past coordinator of Honors Programs and teaches English, creative writing, and film and literature at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Maryland. Trilingual, he writes in English, Spanish, and French.

Robert L. Giron
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