Hesitating Once to Feel Glory

Maleea Acker’s dauntless new poetry collection is crafted with emotion and bold style.

Any day now I shall be released to the Bangladesh runaway,
its burnt out plane a little hulk from a different dimension,

a researcher of longing, no one selling Heineken
from a cooler in its unlit aisles, no one with a line to God.

Acker’s poems hang on precipices of emotion. They cartwheel from sadness to glory, then break into blossoms in a drought-struck landscape of longing. These are poems filled with daring leaps and precise, deft metaphors. There is machinery, there are imaginaries; a dictator selects the musical soundtrack. The poems cajole and praise both the world and interior life with an erotic charge and enduring hope.

“Acker summons a sad, mysterious music, the self talking to the self as though after the end of the world. A book of mesmerizing lamentations, at once precise and surreal.”

“To read Acker’s poetry from Mexico is to celebrate my own country. Her poems are inhabited by taquerias, by the characters I encounter daily, by the codes of coexistence that are not easy for a foreigner to understand and adopt. Reading this collection, too, is to recognize that it is these everyday details—the taquerias, the people and codes—that make a community meaningful, full of import, and, at the same time, lend an ethical dimension to the life of the individual.”