The Poem That Never Ends

Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Sparked by the only two letters--out of over a hundred-that López Medin's mother saved from her own mother in Paraguay, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS weaves together poems and family photos to explore the fragmentation of time, memory, and mother-child relationships. Fragments, family hearing impairments, ripped-up letters, and living and writing between languages point to the inescapable holes in language, troubling the notion of a finite utterance. Layering elements of painting, cinema, and the elusive three dimensions of theater into the weave, THE POEM THAT NEVER ENDS traces a sequence of mothers-López Medin's mother, her mother's mother, herself as a mother-in a porous, restless gesture toward what's never fully grasped.