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Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.
In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author’s own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.
The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.
"Like her acclaimed first book 'Pity the Drowned Horses' and second book 'Seven,' Luna's newest work reminds readers, no matter a person's socio-economic or mental status, all of humanity is linked. Every poem in this collection is a standout. Each piece succinctly captures the discontent of the country's working poor." —Latino Book Review
"Since her 2005 debut Pity the Drowned Horses, Luna has excelled at the elegant lyric, yet what stands out here are the interior landscapes that bridge a visionary attention to nature and raw reflections on mental illness, abuse, trauma, and healing. . . . Luna’s book beautifully expands upon the many intersections between Chicana ecopoetics and disability poetics, while claiming its own lyric territories." —The Latinx Project
"Sheryl Luna's voice is unforgettable because she has a visionary touch where her experiences become our own. As readers, we are blessed to find ourselves in her poems. We have been waiting. As a poet, she shows us, in powerful poem after poem, what it takes for the poet to reveal her place in a difficult world. The result is a book that opens when the poet says so and rests, gently, in the reader's hands." —Ray Gonzalez, author of Feel Puma
“In Magnificent Errors, Sheryl Luna shows us once again why she is one of America’s premier poets. Her gutsy, gorgeous language, her hard-won vision of grit and grace—all bid us enter the universe of a poetic saint whose earthy wisdom is unparalleled.” —Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels
“With Magnificent Errors, Luna has broken the regional boundaries of the American Southwest and become one of America’s finest poets.” —Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning
Sheryl Luna’s first collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, won the inaugural Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize for emerging Latino/a poets (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, Anderson Center, Ragdale Foundation, and Canto Mundo. She received the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award from Sandra Cisneros in 2008. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope, and Notre Dame Review, among others.
I
1. Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps
2. The Vocation
3. The Thief
4. Change
5. Tornillo’s Tent Prison for Migrant Children
6. Salt Shaker
7. Meditation on Hunger
8. Breathing the Border’s Fire
9. The Poet
10. Autumn’s Art
11. Forehead
12. Regeneration
13. What I’d Say if I had Fifteen Minutes of Fame
II
14. Shock and Awe
15. Neighbors Smoke on an Apartment Porch Owned by a
Mental Health Agency
16. Secret Missionary for the Virgin Mary Off His Meds
17. The Sailing Bicycle
18. Shock Treatment
19. Lit
20. Lamentation to Praise
21. The Language of Drowning
22. The Star Song
23. To Rest
24. The Leaves
25. Manic with Depression
26. Eccentric
27. A Homeless Poet Friend Rages at the World’s Lesser People
28. The Party
29. Adopting Step-Father
30. Alone
31. Voice
32. Figures
33. Anxiety and Diagnosis
34. The Artist Addressing Violence
35. The Singer
36. She Wishes She Never Had
37. I.Q. Over 160?
38. The Prayer
III
39. Night
40. Rubbernecking
41. Listening to Sky
42. Risk
43. The Laugh
44. We Believe in Kindness Because It’s Hard to Die
45. Casualties
46. The Witness
47. The Hummingbird
48. Clouds and Sapling
49. Prayer for this Clay Earth
50. Mud
51. Finding Water
52. The Transgression