Centonials, by Masin Persina

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The poems in Centonials are made from New York Times articles published one hundred years, to the day, prior to their own composition. These poems want to time travel, taking note of what musical artists, such as Boards of Canada, accomplish, which is to find a very specific emotion from the past. As poems lack vintage synthesizers (unfortunately) these Centonials use the language of old news articles as their material.  

Surreal, empathetic, wondrous, the poems in Centonials speak to our current moment’s absurdities by using the language of the past to bring to light again the names, ghosts and emotions long buried beneath the mountains of public record.

Masin Persina lives in Richmond, CA with his wife and daughter and their senior dog. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as Sixth Finch, Ninth Letter, Ugly Duckling Presse, The Journal, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He received the Lucille Clifton Scholarship through the Community of Writers and is a graduate of UC Davis MFA program. He currently teaches new teachers how to teach in the Humanities in the East Bay.