“Wild!” she calls out in one poem, and in another ("I am your wild”), Cintia Santana sketches a self-portrait that serves for this high-spirited book, She’s a superb new poet, serving up gusts of generative energy and acute intelligence. There’s wordplay galore in The Disordered Alphabet, but so much more: temptation and swoon, confession, exposure, and the kind of daring formal agitation that accomplishes one rigorous shape after another to enable Santana’s discoveries and her complex harmonic voicings. The alphabet may be disordered, and the cosmos awhirl, but this book is a crystalline achievement of rapture, balance, and brilliance.

–DAVID BAKER

In this outstanding debut collection, where “a mouth breathed out a pale / blue moth, and from the / whorl of a whelk a newborn / elk stepped impossibly out,” Cintia Santana harnesses a language torqued by erasure and loss, imbued with the aftermath of Hiroshima, yet filled with present-tense wonder, to create a set of spell-binding poems.

–ARTHUR SZE

"Cintia Santana's The Disordered Alphabet tussels with diction, wrangles with syntax, struggles with the sentence and the line in a kind of linguistic unmaking that somehow becomes a beautiful, unsettling song."             

—ROSS GAY

POETRY INSTALLATIONS YOUR EYE, THE BEHOLDER