An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards

In An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards, Neil de la Flor takes on the inefficacy of gendered and hetero-sexualized expectations in the modern age. As the poem Shiva points out, Somewhere between male and female, the soul lives unstirred by the memory of childhood // .... Somewhere between Terminal 2 and Terminal 3, the soul lives in a million humming humans who will pass through O Hare in the third person. Inspired in part by music and popular culture, de la Flor employs a brilliant aesthetic sprawl that teems with anaphora and bright imagery; yet within that, there is a rigorous (and ultimately elegiac) interrogation of reality. Pronouns are not to be trusted. You and I can be as close as a spliced consciousness, yet the we is not a harmonious plural. Personalities divide. Alternative memories emerge. Love is a code for lust, one speaker claims, but these poems never settle for hormones and juices. This collection is fierce. Sandra Beasley, author of I Was the Jukebox