An Impression

"On some spiritual quest, we often deny surfaces, decide they are something to move beyond, across, behind, a mask for a motive force. Yet they are our interface. We search endlessly behind things, as if that desire were all, to be sublimated. These are the spaces moved through by Willy Chica’s poetry. Each poem is a gentle fold, a reverential offering to the pyre of ‘becoming’.

In this digital world of poetry sharing, what is unseen is the corporeal self. These are poems of yearning, ambiguous, yet with constant reference to the absent body, the other, woven, “in loomlike bed/ inserting, in pulling/ inlaying, a crafting” Here is a face, a hand, a You, all this reverence, for what is unseen, all this self –unsettling, these strange coils of matter, we see briefly, through tiny word-like portals.

Unified interiors, infinite exteriors, this “Private Sea” the title, quoted from Thoreau, expansive and incomplete, is glimpsed in flashes which punctuate these precisely worded (inter)expressions.

Will’s poems are sensual, a strong chiaroscuro encounter with light and shadow, which shows where the body lays, where the experience is revealed and obscured. They resonate with an affection we cannot help but imagine into, reanimated by our own imaginations, by our own love."

Amanda Joy