The Long Lost Startle
Poems by Joel Toledo
Copyright 2009

Because (Joel Toledo) writes and revises in a world that seems almost certainly on the brink of annihilation, it seems so much more difficult, so much more hopelessly quixotic to record the familiar swing of the pendulum from one given to another; to profess to the audacious, to poetry—and so I am moved by the tenacity of his devotion to "all the rising objects revealed only by refraction."

In language tempered but never burdened by considerations of form and craft, in laser cut images of figures etched against rooftops that go on and on in the urban landscape and evenings which insist on themselves and not on evasive epiphanies, Toledo reminds us that this perishable world still has the capacity to startle and quicken us, perhaps because it is the only one there is.

- Luisa A. Igloria

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