SUMMARY

The winner of the 2018 Nightboat Poetry Prize that enters the space of ritual, incantation and trance with a stunning assemblage of images and structures.

In Like Bismuth When I Enter, Carlos Lara engages language in the purely creative aspect of language–it’s synthesis of dream and waking world. In these vibrant, hallucinatory poems, inspired by the element Bismuth and its iridescent surrealist structure, Lara attempts to produce a collective surge of new imagery, a new mind state, and structural undoing. Like Bismuth When I Entercaptures that moment when the universe strikes you with an unmistakable reminder of mystery via the quotidian or the elemental.