Books
American Quasar
American Quasar is a visual-textual collaboration between poet David Campos and artist Maceo Montoya. What began as an exploration of the precipice of violence evolved into an excavation of self, a deep meditation on how country, family, and trauma affect the ability to love. The images and words build a poetic space where the body is understood in both physical and celestial terms, giving a spiritual dimension to the collection's larger claim that the political is personal.
"The apocalypse doesn't have to be violent. // The horsemen are mirrors." American Quasar looks in rather than out, registering the catastrophe of our times in the merest activities of our most intimate selves. It's a book of spiritual exercises, and its ruminations are ragged, memorable, desperate prayers. Notebook-like in the intimacy of their entanglement, the lyrics and images combine in dynamic and tender reflection. Campos' fierce, direct contemplations turn ordinary anxiety into dramatic and memorable gesture; Montoya's subtle but searing images frame human thought as embodied activity. Both text and image remind us that we exist vibrantly in those states of ambivalence, grief, and anger that we most fear: "What if the wreckage, / the carnage, the catastrophe, was your music?"
--Katie Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News
About American Quasar
Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Campos’s winning collection, as "a work whose five parts trace a son’s efforts—only partially successful—to fulfill his father’s expectations and—perhaps even more difficult—understand those expectations enough to forgive them.” The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his father’s impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his father’s expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man.
"This is a fearless poetics―no heroes, no myth-making, no jazzy lingo games. David Campos is intent on one inner phrase: 'I will become the fire.' I applaud David’s first book. It is relentless in wrestling the darkness, reminiscent in some ways of Delmore Schwartz, Joan Larkin, and Victor Martinez. A tour de force, a rare heart of raw light." - Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate