My mother leaning on tiptoe to pick a yellow Lodi apple boomerangs to me when he describes his mother’s pleasure to taste again the manzanitas de San Juan. The same bolt of lightning flashed through the viewfinder of her Brownie camera as his mother’s. ‘Look at them. Just look at them,’ she tells him of the saints before the altar at the church of Las Trampas. And look he does, swaddling what he sees in language as vivid as the dyed-oxblood huarachas that gave his mother her first glimpse of glamour, and in turn puts their family culture in a context by which readers might celebrate difference.”—Amy Wright, Brevity
“Presentimiento is an exploration of place, home, and heritage. Alternating between prose poems and longer essays, weaving in fictionalized vignettes and even incorporating moments of magical realism, Fletcher writes with a mesmerizing love of and attention to the New Mexican landscape.”—Sonja Swift, Eleven Eleven
“In short, Presentimiento is a book to read slowly and reread for the richness of its imagery, the complexity of its portraits, its evocative power, and, finally, its affirmation of the presence of the past.”—Conrad Shumaker, Southwestern American Literature
"In this unusual work of creative nonfiction, the author’s memories spill out like newly discovered treasures. In a narrative framed by his visit to his aging mother in his native New Mexico, Fletcher provides a series of prose poems—some short, some essay-length—inspired by artifacts that his artist mother 'rescued' from the desert and his own explorations of places he heard about in childhood stories." Full Review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/harrison-candelaria-fletcher/presentimiento/—Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-11-09
In fragments of memory and description, Fletcher (Descanso for My Father, 2012) recalls his mother's life, his family history, and a New Mexico that's disappearing. In this unusual work of creative nonfiction, the author's memories spill out like newly discovered treasures. In a narrative framed by his visit to his aging mother in his native New Mexico, Fletcher provides a series of prose poems—some short, some essay-length—inspired by artifacts that his artist mother "rescued" from the desert and his own explorations of places he heard about in childhood stories. The book lacks a strictly linear plot and is instead organized into eight thematic sections with titles that evoke their moods, including "homing," "root," and "nostalgia." Fletcher's prose vividly depicts the New Mexican landscape; for example, he describes a valley as "the small of a woman's back, an earthen hollow beneath the shoulder blades," and a river as a "mud-brown tapeworm." When he arrives at his mother's house during a storm, he realizes how little he knows "of her life—and how it came to be," so he delves back into time, uncovering stories of his grandparents, his great-grandparents, and other ancestors, which border on folklore. Along the way, he pieces together a family history, with memories overlapping one another through multiple generations. In these stories, a complete picture of his mother gradually emerges—as a young girl, as a wife, as a widow, and as an artist. The tales sometimes evoke the supernatural, including "presentimientos," or visions of loved ones at their deaths, which he says once "happened all the time." These hints of magical realism complement the dreamlike writing and the prominence of the natural world in it. "We live in a world of miracles," his mother says at one point. Fletcher's book is a chronicle of all the quiet miracles that make a life. A lovingly crafted portrait of a person and a place.
