Autobiography of So-and-so:
Poems in Prose

$14.00 paper | 77 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-932826-16-9
Publication Date: Spring 2001
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A Green Rose Book

“With a magical naturalism that refuses to separate the local from the global, Maurice Kilwein Guevara’sAutobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose holds our eye close to the Western wound: where cultures mix only by bleeding into each other. These prose chronicles reconfigure fixed assumptions about self and enter a threshold past which facts are as haunted as nightmares and consensual reality has become a waking dream. . . . The upshot: a troubling beauty that gets at the difficult news with perpetual newness and hope.”
—William Olsen

“Over the course of 46 prose pieces centering on the speaker’s life lived alternately in Colombia and the United States, Guevara works up a self-portrait in which each tale builds off the previous to make an accumulative, unflinching music. ‘”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Maurice Kilwein Guevara … gives us a book that is part memoir, part poetry collection and part surrealistic vision of what it is to have one foot in North America and one in South. …As the voice of a man caught between cultures, this is a quintessentially American book. …To be American, Guevara implies, is to live here but to be connected elsewhere.”
—Michael Simms, Pittsurgh Post-Gazette

“The playful title establishes the tone Guevara maintains almost throughout, as the author takes autobiographical material and imaginatively recasts it into something of nearly mythical proportions, as Marquez so often does with his characters. Perhaps because American poets tend to mine their pasts so grimly and journalistically, Guevara’s work startles the reader with it joyful, fun house distortions. …While rooted in Latin American surrealism, Guevara concocts a language and a world that is all his own.”
—John Bradley, Rain Taxi

Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Maurice Kilwein Guevara was born in 1961 in Belencito, Colombia, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has received awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the J. William Fulbright Commission. His books of poetry includePostmortem (University of Georgia Press, 1994) and Poems of the River Spirit (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). He is currently Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.