“Poet and translator Michelle Gil-Montero’s language, chiseled by acute observations of her intimate and liminal surroundings, is a dazzling constellation of what Roland Barthes calls “speckled with these sensitive points.” These “so many points” poke and puncture our internalized rigidity and borders, giving us access to an alternative universe of tenderness as well as vulnerability. Gil-Montero is without doubt one of the rare, gifted and fierce poet-translators working today.”
“With their paradoxical co-embodiment of impulse and exactitude, Michelle Gil-Montero’s lyrics remind me of Marosa Di Giorgio’s work, and of a neuron’s. Here poetics is physics: what’s linked in a few syllables of sound and association can have at once dazzling and coruscating effects depending on the scale or closeness with which it is perceived. Thus the lyric’s intimacy is both gorgeous and terrible.”
“By dint of / positioning,’ these poems unfold a lyric voice with few certainties but, rather, positionings, juxtapositions, movements across and over, settlings then movements again. Hushed, dense but allowing breath, pared in language, Gil-Montero’s poems are multiple in form, taut. They resonate and return, pulse. An excellent début.”
“Michelle Gil-Montero’s poems are resonantly visionary, making visible the delicate stitches that attach houses, bodies, words. The precise notations within the vastness of experience create an attention so exquisite, each minute shift resounds, calling to mind H.D.’s ‘intricate songs’ lost measure.’ This is a book of exceptional insight and immediacy.”
poetry
Three poems and interview in Etcetera
Three poems in Black Sun Lit
Poem in Figure 1
Poem in Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics
Four visual poems in Unlost: A Journal of Found Poetry and Art
Two poems in Spoon River Poetry Review
Poem in Poetry Daily
Poem in Poem-a-Day, Academy of American Poets
Five poems in Seedings
Poems and translations in Propeller
other writing
Language of Grief, Body, and Translation: Maria Negroni’s The Annunciation,” TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, August 2021, pp. 23-39, doi:10.21992/tc29537
“Practicing Detours,” Spoon River Poetry Review Blog
“A Note on the Translation,” Caesura
“A Brief En Trance into Nowhere (in Particular)—and a Little Here Say,” Poesía en Acción
“Shattered Writing: A Key, Collage, Entredeux,” Cordite Poetry Review