Description

Still is a collection of poems that focuses on the immigrant experience: a family's journey from Lima, Peru to Miami, Florida as political refugees and asylum seekers and the impact that had on the life of a boy as he grew into a man. Renzo Del Castillo's poems often reveal larger moral concerns, touching in their language the world of politics and betrayal that cannot help but impose upon the world of private language. That heritage of terror and exile that sometimes underlies these poems gives them a sense of history within the lyric confusions of a single life, capturing the idiosyncrasies of the Miami landscape as a destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrations that intersect with an evolving definition of American identity. These poems include reflections of memory and transition, as well as adaptation to new cultures and geographies, through an ethnographic lens. There is a lovely and intimate tone, used to remind the reader that imagination triumphs over, or sometimes through, adversity.