López Medin’s commitment to recovering remnants of the past results in a moving suite of prose poems and lineated poems, along with photos and drawings — all intricately tracing her own matrilineage, domestic work, and disability ... For López Medin, assembling and sewing together scraps mirrors the efforts of comprehending bits and pieces of language ... What is unspoken and unheard between generations takes root in the poems, and the poet yearns for what is encrypted and what might be unearthed ... Sewing and its ritualistic labor function nimbly in many of these poems as a figure for poetic fabrication. Calling on the reader’s participation and understanding, López Medin sometimes incorporates a visual representation of stitches by employing rows of em dashes to divide various sections of a poem.
Abandonment haunts the lyrical and material text ... This book fashions a temporality that limns the gaps between space, language, and silence ... I felt pulled into a relationship between these mother-daughter mediums, the interplay of forms, the writer's paper and seamstress' fabric, the motion of the mother flying between lands ... We see each other through loose seams, the poet implies, and we hear each other by assembling the salient into a story, which must be incomplete, by nature.
A brilliant exploration of family history and the documentary fragment. Bridging poetry, prose, and image, Poem That Never Ends enacts the silences and fissures, vulnerabilities and intimacies within domestic spaces .. This collection is a beautiful rendering of what is torn away from the familial past.
An illuminating and expansive collection of lyrical fragments stitched together, the book tells the story of the poet’s mother and grandmother, as well as her own ... It is precisely the sensitive way in which Medin continuously strives to make sense of the past through poetry, memoir and letter writing, 'sewing' her prose and poems together, that makes this an outstanding collection ... A brave and confident book that brilliantly fuses genres, literary forms and languages — English, Spanish and Guarani — to create a tour de force. It’s one of the most exciting and innovative books by a Latinx poet I’ve read this year and I can’t recommend it enough.
... balances polarities such as absence and presence, revelation and discretion, and intimacy and distance. A visual motif of dashes operates in paradox, by turns representing stitches (a coming together) and perforation (a tearing apart) ... there’s a restlessness to the contradictory mamas, and the repetition takes on the incantatory tone of a benediction in the final scene of this powerfully filmic, ingeniously constructed book.
