landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press, 2015) is poet Michelle Penaloza's first book.

Praise For landscape/heartbreak:

Peñaloza's poignantly appealing landscape/heartbreak is greater than a collection of breakup poems, its personal veritable culture in American poetry. Hers is a chain that plumbs the that means of what it capacity to like, sacrificing to mystery away bits and items of one's self whose different components stay scattered on corners, in parks, and bridges. This assortment is ready the enterprise of reconciling stories and ghosts, the longevity in studying the best way to breathe back. —Major Jackson

I’ve been in love with landscape/heartbreak on account that sooner than it was once written, from the instant I first discovered of Michelle Peñaloza’s wild thought: to map heartbreak. What if strangers instructed their tales whereas wandering the avenues and backstreets of a urban? What if trauma might be healed one footfall at a time? Peñaloza enacts an city alchemy, remodeling the walkers’ own struggles into artwork and thereby coming towards her personal continual ghosts. a suite for someone who has ever had her (or his) middle stomped on. this implies so much people. a strong and fascinating
debut. —Susan Rich

The question—"What damage you into poetry?"—lies on the heart of Michelle Peñaloza's landscape/heartbreak. And her poems urge us to hunt the reply, following Peñaloza's speaker on her sojourn the place jogging and respiring create the meditative cadence to lull the physique into the ecstatic kingdom important for conjuration. From the great thing about those poems emerge the ghosts of these loves that experience splintered us into jagged items. As we traverse Peñaloza's lyrical panorama, the "sueded/beads of unopened wild poppies" and "renegade ferns/growing upon the stumps of outdated docks" delicate over the serrated edges of what cuts us deep. it is a really good and haunting assortment. —Oliver de los angeles Paz

As you learn this outstanding assortment, it's possible you'll imagine that every poem starts off with humans jogging via a urban. yet then, pricey reader, you recognize that it truly is now not humans within the distance, for you have been invited at the trip to boot. those poems will shipping you're keen on that, after which they are going to stroll beside you thru a panorama of heartache and longing. whereas there, "You can glance back," Peñaloza writes, "remember the tales underneath all this shine." And those tales do shine. and you'll bear in mind them. —Matthew Olzmann