Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi’s poems encourage connections
Ines Rivera Prosdocimi believes that poems unlock both physical and ideological borders.
“There is something really beautiful about reading or hearing a poem that reflects your reality, validates your experience, or just moves you,” she says.
People have approached her to let her know they were moved by her work. One young girl told her that a poem made her reflect on her upbringing in a multi-ethnic home. A young man reacted to her poem about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. That earthquake displaced his family and brought him to Connecticut.
“Poetry has this way of encouraging connections between individuals and eliciting dialogue, conversations that might be difficult to engage in but that we need, especially in today’s climate,” says Rivera Prosdocimi, who lives in Avon and teaches literature at the University of Hartford.
Her first poetry collection, “Love Letter to an Afterlife,” considers themes of border crossings, bilingualism, race, and also those old favorite themes of poets: love and death. She explores what it’s like to inhabit multiple worlds, including Dominican Republic, Argentina, and the United States. The worlds of English and of Spanish, childhood and adulthood, and the world that hovers between the living and the dead are among her subjects. Her book was a finalist for the 2019 International Latino Book Award and the 2019 Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.
Rivera Prosdocimi grew up in a household where literature was communal: something to share, preserve, and pass on. Her parents and others of their generation had memorized lines of poetry. They enjoyed poetry very much, as well as other forms of literature.
She remembers writing her first poems in fifth grade, enjoying the process of creating them, “fitting words together like a puzzle and not knowing how a poem would end.”
Rivera Prosdocimi holds a doctorate in comparative literature and an MFA in creative writing. Her poem “Surrogate Twin” recently appeared in New York Times Magazine and she is hard at work on her next collection of poems.
One day you’ll get a college degree, then a Masters, then…
That building’s halls were long & wide as soccer fields. There were closets where my voice came back to me, portals I could enter & hide from the alligators I saw at night.
That building had a real round man; his bald head all shine & slick, when he asked, children? looking Papa up and down.
We drove home at night.
No one said nothing.
A beam of light from a passing car hit my Mama’s pale face, the back of Papa’s hand, dark against her cheek he caressed. I remembered a boy from school asking me why I didn’t look like my parents. I understood the question, right there in the backseat & wondered if the tooth fairy could change our colors in exchange for a tooth.
Then the dance began again, and I remembered a cockfight we’d watched in horror.
They never end until one rooster quits.
In a house whose writer disappeared, cluttered by clothes hangers, pads he’d stitch into shoulder seams
& the roosters his boss nurtured for the cockfights, he’d tell me stories of el campo, where the flamboyans sat apart & cane stretched out for miles. Backroads where you could breathe, bachata’s beat like a distant drum leading you. The pain in those songs felt good that last night we were innocent. He made a cat a paper cup shirt.
I pushed the cuticles of his left foot, cutting nails that’d snap—and—fly.
Frank Reyes sang Vine when we took our dominos out, smacked one after the other on the concrete floor, looking out for the double-six promising to come; each black pip that stared us in the face.