Poetry might be that iguana that runs over the rooftops of a dead-end street, devouring juicy mangos while the neighbors want to trap it and serve it up at dinnertime. Without a doubt Jeremy Paden has found a dwelling place. Good poets have that ability to make and remake worlds, to take us to other dimensions with a surprising naturalness. “must we always fight / to own by merit / the madness that is ours?” Paden asks us. And it is precisely this madness that he embodies in a revealing bestiary where lizards, iguanas, hares, rhinoceroses, etc. reside with other characters in a unique synchrony. Paden is the angel of abandoned houses or the one that sifts through language to find the bones of Dürer or Nero. Where will Paden take us in his raft? Like a strange Charon that lights an eternal bonfire with the ashes of God. This book offers a wonderful trip, one where we dive in and come away, as Rojas wrote, with just a kiss of foam, or, to recall the ineffable Simic, one where we hear the laughter canned at the scene of our own crucifixion. Congratulations on this unsettling self-portrait whose first sketches, as Zurita would say, already belong to the ocean of speech.
Mario Meléndez Muñoz
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Jeremy Paden ignites the veil that disguises colonialism as heroism in his vital new collection World as Sacred Burning Heart. A feat of emotional and historical integrity, the poems offer portraits of seafaring captains and their exploits in inhabited worlds new to them. It’s the poet’s eye that serves as balance: a gaze determined to show the beauty that entitlement destroys. When one voyager acknowledges “the truth that we never travel/ beyond ourselves, that we sail weighted/ with a cargo of heartbreak, of fear,” Paden proves he has penned a wise and unforgettable journey.
Mitchell L. H. Douglas, dying in the scarecrow’s arms
On a first reading of Jeremy Paden’s many-layered world as sacred burning heart, you need not have a firm grasp of the particulars to be drawn into the Age of Discovery it investigates, the sixteenth century to be specific, but reader, beware: you may find yourself drawn back again and again, and in the interval trying to comprehend where it is you stand, literally, while also seeing how maps shape and are shaped by a particular world view. While this is a book of dispraises—the gospel of love becoming a cover for rapaciousness; captains, mindful of duty and patronage, telling only the parts of the story that shore up the shared dream of a New Jerusalem—it is also a very human book, and that is the poetry in it. Anaphora pulses through the lineated poems as well as the captain poems, written in analogue form and in which, from bare-bone fragments, Paden fleshes out what is left out of the official letters. In the relationship between his office and the man who is captain, we see how to cling to the dream is to see reality as a nightmare, to project one’s desires and fears upon the world. Here are the roots of global trade and colonial empires as they unfold primarily in Latin America and the Caribbean. Here is a book to feel your way through where we have been, to know where we are.
Debra Kang Dean, Totem: America
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In world as sacred burning heart, Jeremy Paden selects as his protagonist that shadow, Christopher Columbus. Columbus and all the other captains, the ones who took and took and still take. In so doing, Paden interrogates the official and unofficial histories of the Americas. Somehow, all the while, Paden unrolls the forgotten map that leads to the one treasure that can never, ever be stolen: the shared and shareable human heart.
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Rebecca Gayle Howell, American Purgatory
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How do we “sing the song that remembers/the world into wholeness”? Jeremy Paden has done it in this astonishing new collection of poems documenting the Spanish Colonial period. Inspired in part by the great mappamundi of the 15th and 16th centuries – cordiform and cloverleaf; the face of the jester as if to provoke the vanity of conquering princes – these knowing, expansive poems are in part a “song to ignorance and consequences,” of the captains: Cortes, Aguirre, de Vaca and most of all Columbus, their dreams of sons and cinnamon-skinned lovers; their search for the islands of nutmeg and pepper; their doubts and retractions; how they will “love & eat & steal” from a lush and feathered paradise of scarlet and ochre, of green mountains and sweet cane; of gold, of gold, of gold. But too, they are the song of the encantado, the river dolphin with blind eyes, and of ayotl and cuauhtli at the beginning of the world, its story of brokenness made whole; of the nopal, the world tree, and of an Incan mermaid carved on a temple wall high above the river. They are the bloodsong of Moctezuma and the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. World as Sacred Burning Heart recovers that wholeness as heart that flares and pants with the desires of the conquered and the conquering, an ancient story urgent and still beating in our blood.
Lynnell Edwards, This Great Green Valley
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Bilingual Edition (English and Spanish)
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Haunting, beautiful watercolors and pen and ink drawings highlight the proud traditions of the Central American Nahuas. This emotional narrative beseeches everyone, everywhere, to understand why some things are worth dying for.
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–Foreword Reviews
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Spoken by a mother to her small daughter as they are detained at a border wall, Under the Ocelot Sun is a powerful account of refugees’ plight. The mother speaks of the beauty of their Honduran homeland and of her abuela’s wisdom. She also touches on the violent forces they are fleeing. She wants her little one to know her heritage and why they have taken this perilous journey. Lyrically told (in English and Spanish) and vibrantly illustrated, this is a picture book for our time.
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-George Ella Lyon
Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015–2016
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Co-Winner of the 2020 Campoy-Ada Prize for Illustrated Children's Book with Special Cultural Content
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A portion of the net proceeds from the sale of Under the Ocelot Sun will go to support the work of El Futuro of North Carolina, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit outpatient clinic that provides comprehensive mental health services for Latino families in a bilingual environment of healing and hope.
Jeremy Paden’s poems are a help to me as I work to understand what it means to be fully human. While each poem in prison recipes underscores there’s nothing one human won’t do to another, each poem also argues, through glorious language, that we do have the capacity to treat each other compassionately.
—Kathleen Driskell, Blue Etiquette
A beautiful collection of poems that speaks for the disappeared, the murdered, and the tortured men and women whose lives were shattered by Latin America’s Southern Cone dictatorships. An artisan of words and captivating imagery, Jeremy Paden reconstructs not only the pain, the agony, and the voices that were forever silenced but also a language of hope against “the powers of this world,” and songs and melodies that defy violence and historical amnesia.
—Oswaldo Estrada, Luces de emergencia
prison recipes provides deft commentary on Argentina’s “Dirty War,” demonstrating how even while incarcerated under the auspices of state terrorism, people, not unlike water, find a way... Survival isn’t just a matter of staying nourished physically. Sometimes survival is about remaining sane in the midst of insanity...These poems are urgent and unflinching as they interrogate humanity in the face of horror. The answer...has much to do with even a single voice lifting to declare, I sing/not just to sing/not just because my voice is good/I sing/I sing because….
—Bianca Lynne Spriggs, Call Her By Her Name
"Some words / are better left as acts...” (prison recipes), but you will be glad the words in these poems were left as words. That lead to action. If you are a lover of green words and austral shores, if you would like to learn how to make sock cheese and multiply breadcrumbs, you have found your book.
—Edward Stanton, Wide as the Wind
Black Bone is an anthology of Affrilachian Poetry co-edited by Bianca Spriggs and Jeremy Paden (with considerable help by Dorian Hairston).
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Black Bone: University Press of Kentucky
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"The Affrilachian Poets continue to be a groundbreaking literary force. . . . In celebration of their decades-long collaboration, the group has published its first anthology, Black Bone."
―Detroit Free Press
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"Black Bone is a testament to the work of this trailblazing group which has created a poetic revolution by demanding recognition and promoting racial justice through dynamic and impact writing."
―Mid-South Tribune​
ruina montium is a collection that does the most important thing poems can do: honor... Based on the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, these lyrically precise and beautifully attentive poems give voice to the miners who were trapped that day and practice the ancient and good magic of survival. Both tender and clear-eyed, these poems are strong enough to lift each one of us from the darkness.
—Ada Limón
"Los 33,” the miners trapped in the 2010 Copiapó mine disaster in Chile, must have resorted to biblical allegory in an effort to comprehend their physical predicament. Eventually, the sixty-nine days underground simply became metaphysical—Jonah, Daniel, Lazarus, Christ—these analogies are just. The language of deliverance and the aspect of resurrection rightly rise in these richly contemplative poems. Eerily, these poems collectively anticipate being “born again,” but not yet. The poems in this collection make the waiting in the dark, the absolute uncertainty, and the spiritual anguish wrenching. And yet, beauty is not absent from this realm. The day thirty-three men walked out of the earth alive, as Paden’s sure hand implies, was a day of miracles.
—Maurice Manning
Every life cut short deserves a memorial. These monuments, these heavy and sharp-edged poems that transport the reader to cavernous depths with the intention of excavating our capacity to remember, succeed. The poet submerges us deeper than the seven-hundred meter search for copper with these Chileans and skillfully deposits us back on the surface, all the richer, our hearts full of precious metals.
—Frank X Walker
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The poems in this fine collection view love as both a desire and a dilemma, the kind of passion found in other poets willing to confront the heart with such honesty, namely Neruda. If desire is ever perfect, it is only perfect once—and then what? That last flicker of a question is a sharp yet satisfying pang running through these poems. Meanwhile, behind the intensity shared by two, we have the wider world, which is either indifferent or falling apart. These poems are not simply wise or desperate—they are both at once.
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—Maurice Manning
In Jeremy Paden's work, a finely-tuned intellect and a capacious heart join forces, so that precision and craft are brought to bear on a gorgeous lyrical extravagance, giving us poems that are at once graceful and surprising, unabashedly romantic and unashamedly erudite, sensual and sharp, flowers growing from the cracks in stone.
—Cecilia Woloch
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