Burn Lake (Penguin Poets)

ISBN: 0143117718

Author: Fountain, Carrie

Condition: New

Selected for the 2009 National Poetry Series by Natasha TretheweySet in southern New Mexico, where her family's multicultural history is deeply rooted, the poems in Carrie Fountain's first collection explore issues of progress, history, violence, sexuality, and the self. Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with the peculiar journey of Don Juan de Oate, who was dispatched from Mexico City in the late sixteenth- century by Spanish royalty to settle the so-called New Mexico Province, of which little was known. A letter that was sent to Oate by the Viceroy of New Spain, asking that should he come upon the North Sea in New Mexico, he should give a detailed report of "the configuration of the coast and the capacity of each harbor" becomes the inspiration for many of the poems in this artfully composed debut.