ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.

Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker’s secret thoughts. Haunted by loss—of parents, of children, of the self—the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: “[A]nd sometimes it’s hard to know / on which side of the river I stand.” Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.

Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows. He is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.

Natalia Treviño is a translator of Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours. A poet and writer of fiction and nonfiction, Treviño is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Vista College and holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. Born in Mexico City, Treviño has lived in San Antonio, Texas, for most of her life.

REVIEWS

“The time has come for cross-border poetics to become a core element of a Greater Americas humanism. Driven by a passionate devotion to convinencia, Octavio Quintanilla’s The Impossible Hours transforms the hyper-situatedness of the dispossessed, the alienated, the cursed, into a Cathedral of Light whose dazzling insights splash us with a searing new cosmovision.”—Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Cut Point

“Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours writes of La Bestia, the train that cuts off the legs of desperate Latin American exiles, turns bullets into raindrops and umbrellas, and pushes poems around on the page until they become wild word paintings. This book has much to teach us.”—Spencer Reece, author of The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir

“‘I want to think where I’m going will be free of borders,’ Quintanilla writes. These poems—informed by an artist’s eye, the art shifted by a poet’s vision—refuse to ignore thresholds, strange angles, and blockades. We lodge in tight corners and find prayers emerge from line and shadow.”—Lauren Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate and author of In Old Sky: Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon

“Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours pushes against itself and ruptures the poetic grids inhabited by beasts, storms, scarecrows, black cows, neighbors digging graves at night, and poems that dismantle the physical and psychological structure of our realities. It invites us to confront our own mortality, and bears witness to the testimonies of rage and hope tattooed on our flesh/spirit.”—Elizabeth Torres, winner of the 2022 Ambroggio Prize for Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes

“Las Horas Impossibles / The Impossible Hours gathers seemingly simple everyday events and objects and elevates them to levels rarely seen—poems, like ‘Black Cow,’ where the last line delivers a punch not easily forgotten. If this were a meal, the various courses would delight my senses. With alacrity and wit, the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum. I like the playful yet serious tone that disarms and allows the messages in the poem to sneak in and reverberate in the reader’s mind.”—Norma E. Cantú, author of Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers

“When you enter Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, you step into a language-built landscape, a witness summoned by the trickster of art that will not conform to genre. Here, the reader is invited to inhabit a world both familiar and estranged, where the personal and the collective intertwine in luminous, haunting images, and poetry becomes both vessel and voyage.”—CMarie Fuhrman, co-editor Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry— -

AWARDS

Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, 2024