‘Echo’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
For me, the magic in a prose poem is its authority. By presenting itself in the same form as fiction and nonfiction, the prose poem appears to claim more space (on the page, in your mind) than it might have otherwise. Show me a prose poem with a narrative of sorts and I am simply ready to believe everything I am reading is true. Truer than true. I’m not sure why I feel this way.
‘Echo,’ by Valerie Mejer Caso (translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil-Montero), is such a poem. It is a dream made flesh, and vice versa. It imagines a world with no ocean, it remembers the dead, it names the trees as witnesses. All displayed as observation. As recording. The childlike imagination—childlike in the sense that a child’s imagination is unburdened, not undeveloped—is expansive, so expansive that the poem ends without finding the edge of the memory or the future.