City of Eves

Silvia Bonilla holds an MFA from the New School. She is the author of the chapbook An Animal Startled by the Mechanisms of Life.

"Silvia Bonilla's City of Eves is a book of haunting precision and simmering brilliance. Spare and atmospheric, these poems investigate lovers, curses, hunger, possibility, poverty, migration, identity, transformation, and stasis. We meet parents, then meet children, then contemplate God. Narratives run together incisively; they split and then reconvene. One poem references the 'shivering act / of happiness'; another announces, 'I came loose from my past.' Bonilla's keen powers of observation, sense, and sound are just what we need right now."-Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing "City of Eves is a keen exploration of womanhood, culture, and identity. The collection sings deep truths and elicits 'walking dreams' with which to consider the Eves we've known and carried."-Gloria Munoz, author of Danzirly "Silvia Bonilla's City of Eves makes visceral the precarity and hardship that accompanies immigration from South America to the United States where poverty and its hungers, accompanied by the intersections of race and gender, remains a violence."-Brenda Cardenas, author of Trace "Silvia Bonilla's language is furiously alive, rippling with startling imagery. The linguistic intensity enacts the slippages and beauty of belonging-Sonia and her friends live in a whirlwind of poverty, in the din of gender norms. Bonilla reveals the necessity of migration but also sets nostalgia in motion. Interiority is vividly felt: it's luminous, barbed. Bonilla's debut is brilliant, singular."-Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine "City of Eves is a stunning, lyrical meditation of self, history, human relation and world. Photo albums give way to questions of God. Love pervades every turn. We see the complexity of self and identity; the intergenerational gaze; landscapes, both past and present. Everywhere is this poignant question put to human ache: 'I wanted the world to speak,' Bonilla writes, 'but it was just me and my thoughts, and iron pressing the chest.'"-Bianca Stone, author of What is Otherwise Infinite