| Abstrakt: |
Through closely reading several poems from Yesenia Montilla's 2022 collection, Muse Found in a Colonized Body , I argue that the poetry's key modal and scalar feature is lamentation. I distinguish lamentation from elegy by describing their distinct scales of prosopopoeia, species imagination, and apostrophic address, arguing that lamentation's necessarily communal lyric voice is uniquely suited to elaborating Montilla's grief. In particular, I note how Montilla's thorough reliance on the language of transformation offers lamentation as a means of imagining a world that has so long been antagonistic to Afro-Latinx life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
