“Orrery for Borderland Ghosts” is after “Abecedarian for Borderland Ghosts” by César L. de León and is influenced by Cecilia Vicuña’s Precario/Precarious: “Lo precario es una metafora espacial, una historia escrita en la memoria de la tierra y el cuerpo de los transeuntes.” The poem also deals with the concept of nepantla and history as wound explored by Gloria Anzaldúa in her masterwork "Borderlands/La Frontera."
"I have always felt that Clifton is too narrowly read....I would like to make a case for her as a crossroads figure in contemporary American poetry; a poet so varied in subject matter, tone, and style that one finds in her work traces and auguries of past and future voices."
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“'The Meteor' starts in the far past, with a blackout: 'tutto annerò.' Annerò—that’s the past remote, a tense that doesn't exist in English. It indicates a past so far past that the present can’t touch it. But Pascoli means to infiltrate, undermine it—which is part of what compels me about the poem. It’s what compels me about translation, too: this vibrant failure of equivalence that brings the past into the present and present into the past."
