Matadora

reviews

Every once in a while a poetry book bursts onto the scene—heavy with luggage tagged from all manner of airports—just begging to be unpacked....Matadora introduces us to a fearless new talent, whose voice is sure to be a significant and sexy siren call—compelling us to return again and again to the poems in this remarkably stunning debut collection." 
—Mid-American Review

"In Sarah Gambito’s first book, a world is reborn and so to accommodate it the speaker assumes just so many multiple elations, all of them daughters and sisters of the things of the world. These poems fly in from other countires. They blur the speed of prayers with alt.rock lyrics. In the poems continents reverse themselves as if drifting in amniotic fluid, lines of lineage re-emerge and voices in other languages adopt themselves to various new forms of speech. The speaker arrives from time to time. She is like snow. She takes short holidays. She smiles at birthday cards. She flits from Tagalog to East Villagese. She has a halogen stereo and waits for 'my late great Chachi.' She tries on her butterfly kite. Through all this, she is the breathless sum of her various accoutrements: crystal and sea-egg, a borealis, a lamp, a holidaypipe, a Paloma, a sister. A beautiful book." 
—Tan Lin

"The poems in Sarah Gambito's first book, Matadora, are sheer juxtapositions of anything--star fish, Tagalog, frisson-- and the friction very often adds a political dimension to the poetic. Lovely!" 
—Kimiko Hahn