Into the World Outspread: Notes from a Walker - poems by Renato Rosaldo

Renato Rosaldo is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at New York University and the author of five books of poetry, including The Chasers, The Day of Shelly’s Death, and this one. His bilingual book, Prayer to Spider Woman/Rezo a la mujer araña, won the American Book Award in 2004. Diego Luna’s Insider Tips won the Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Manuscript Prize, selected by Martin Espada.

Into the World Outspread is 104 pages, printed on 50# creme paper with a matte-finish cover featuring artwork by Bill Florez.

“Renato Rosaldo’s poetry catapulted me into navigating the world with a disability. My gratitude for doing so with a scientist’s accuracy, a bodhisattva’s compassion, and a poet’s grace.”

— Sandra Cisneros

“Renato Rosaldo is one of those rare poets who speaks in many different registers and to diverse readerships. The Day of Shelly’s Death combines poetry with anthropology in a breathtaking volume. The Chasers transforms testimonies from the author’s high school Mexican American gang into moving prosody. Now Rosaldo gives us Into the World Outspread: Notes from a Walker. The last word in this title can be read as someone who walks the earth and writes eloquently of the experience, as well as a mobilization device for the physically impaired. If you doubt this is poetic material, you would be wrong. Rosaldo continues to stun us with his insight, feeling and grace. A compelling book!”

— Margaret Randall, author of Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises

“I don’t know how he does it. Renato Rosaldo writes about the hardest subjects with grace, accuracy, and love. His tender apprehension of details, images and scenes soars above the struggles, as his poems offer greater understanding of poetry’s presence in all of life’s moments. What a powerful voice!”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation

“When we enter Renato Rosaldo’s Into the World Outspread: Notes From a Walker, we are never waylaid because each poem in this down-to-earth collection connects at the heart of human matters great and small. Walking becomes an act of mediation, mindfulness, and a ritual of healing.”

— Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

“Into the World Outspread: Notes from a Walker brings Renato Rosaldo’s growing body of poetry before readers who have found in his earlier volumes a poet who explores social and cultural identity, parenting, personal tragedy (the still- unexplained death of his first wife), and a life of the mind. In this lively, frank, and sometimes discomforting collection, his poems consider aging, illness, injury, and recovery. Here the ‘experts’ are many, but only a few know what is wrong, and the poet is fortunate in his openness to listen to them all and find what helps him to recover. These are poems that shake their fist at suffering while thanking family, friends, and a trusty walker for a body compromised, but a life fully lived.”

— Patricia Spears Jones, author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems

“Collapse, falling, buckling, derramado—your body spilled across the floors of daily life. It is not the daily life you once had before the stroke. It is not the same body you once inhabited. Your questions are radical now—the future, the transitions, recovery, the new ‘Exotic dance of pain,’ your placements of ‘leg, pelvis and torso’ are central to your new life. This book does not buckle or wince or fear. Rosaldo does not pull back. His poems are fearless. His ‘notes’ are precise, studied, balanced on ripped tendons. The stranger with a new face in the mirror faces the ‘out of place’ body. The poems become his ‘walker.’ Centimeter by centimeter, the speaker drags, collapses, hopes and floats in between worlds toward the luminous ‘inner jaguar.’ This collection is astounding in its bodies of structure, line, pace and layers of story, remembrance, hope—and its meditations and maps of suffering and transcendence. This is a poetry for this exact moment—Enlightenment, healing rising, pinnacle of Rosaldo’s writing career.”

— Juan Felipe Herrera, United States Poet Laureate Emeritus