Pentimento

Wounds lie at the center of Joshua Garcia’s masterful Pentimento. From this scar tissue, Garcia powerfully reclaims the past as an antidote to shame, as proof of survival, in order to cultivate queer joy. Through poems honed by a quiet confidence and masterful command over the braiding of memory, Garcia charts the evolution of self-discovery and takes on Whitman’s charge to sing the body electric. These poems are corporeal, raw, aching, bold in their tenderness, gentle in their honesty. This is what I come to poetry for: vulnerability transmuted through language into divine fire.
—Jacques J. Rancourt

In Pentimento, Joshua Garcia fuses the sacred with the secular, moving from churches to karaoke, from Jesus at the gastroenterologist to John the Baptist cruising in a state park, all the while revealing a self and world riven by loss and the remnants of a broken faith. A master of radiant detail, he takes us beyond what we think we see, returning, again and again, to his deft layering of art and myth, to the grace of heartbreak, to the body as first wound and source of all desire. This is a beautiful book and an exciting debut.
—Bruce Snider

Pentimento is more than a book of poems—the poems within “make reservoirs / of their own bodies.” Joshua Garcia’s graceful attention to the queer body’s task of love has made a collection where we can glimpse ourselves in the messy act of living. “I like the idea that the whole world is born from a scar,” says the poet, and despite the precarity of these origins, “let me build my love on yours.”
–C.T. Salazar