1Poetry. Manuel Iris reclaims the poetic space as a radical exploration and celebration of paternal love and tenderness. If language is a vector of truth and transformation, if 'the poem opens its wound' to the spaces in which we examine ourselves and love begets love, the poems in this bilingual collection offer the magnitude and direction to do exactly what poetry aims to do: say in words what can never be expressed in words. Iris' poems reveal the silences of our most vulnerable selves, and 'the silence/ toward which we migrate, / from which we came.'--Tara Skurt