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Cintia Santana

she/her

Poet, Translator, and Interdisciplinary artist

Cintia Santana

Cintia Santana's debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023), was short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance 2023 Golden Poppy Award in Poetry and received the 2023 North American Book Award's Silver Medal in Poetry. David Baker says, "Cintia Santana is a superb new poet, serving up gusts of generative energy and acute intelligence. There’s wordplay galore in The Disordered Alphabet, but so much more: temptation and swoon, confession, exposure, and the kind of daring formal agitation that accomplishes one rigorous shape after another to enable Santana’s discoveries and her complex harmonic voicings. The alphabet may be disordered, and the cosmos awhirl, but this book is a crystalline achievement of rapture, balance, and brilliance." Santana's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, and numerous journals. Her honors include fellowships from CantoMundo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She teaches literary translation and poetry workshops in Spanish and in English at Stanford University.

About Their Work:

Cintia Santana’s words shadow and stay.  In them vanishing comes alive, ruins and worms are given their due, history itself becomes a revelatory e-viscera.  Some of Santana’s poems seem generated from wordplay and word roots, some by a meditation on history and memory, some by both.  What ties them all together is a singular voice, neither blatantly personal nor impersonally collective, that speaks life only to find it “lush with loss” and makes of that negative presence and chiaroscuro cornucopia.  While poetry is often regarded as a kind of truth-telling, these poems don’t so much “true” what they say as break truth into prismatic reflections and rivulets that feed sense and soul.

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The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023)

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