the page is all around us. our eye is the beholder.
how do we read words, objects,
and each other?
where do we find joy, together and alone?
Finalist
WINNER (2024)
“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
“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
Praise for The Disordered Alphabet:
about me
I’m a poet, translator, and interdisciplinary artist. My poetry, translations, and fiction have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, as well as numerous journals. I am the recipient of fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. I have the good fortune to teach translation courses, in addition to poetry workshops in Spanish and in English at Stanford University. I’m a former member of San Francisco’s Right Window Gallery. Rumor has it I’ve dressed as a human-sized gold nugget and performed anti-Trump poems in front of San Francisco City Hall.
