Solute

Poetry. Daniel Padilla's SOLUTE is the first book from a young poet who is, as he says in one poem, standing "at the threshold of desire/ throwing Molotov cocktails/ at the door." In these spare, quiet, yet passionate poems, Padilla speaks of his own need--his "hunger for ink"--to make from this desire an artifact of language charged with meaning. Even when Padilla's speakers prove immobile, or unmoving, the body still exists, there is the "I am" of presence, and the body remains "ambitious/ with desire." Padilla's subjects long for transformation in a world that seems frozen in immutability: "she shudders at a thought/ circles never end// stares into the smoke/ for sparks." Padilla, and all those for whom he speaks, may seem to stand, unable to move past liminalities and into the fullness of being, but it is exactly this inertia that lends them the protean energy of desire.