The Book of Conjurations, Irizelma Robles’s fourth poetry collection, transforms poet, reader and language through its conjurations. Among these pages, we find all forms of material existence transmuted. Barbwire, rain, soul, sugarcane, scream are all raw materials for alchemy, or poetry.
Drawing from the periodic table, precious and semi-precious stones, minerals, rocks, the elements, flora and fauna from Puerto Rico, the Caribbean and Latin America, and her memories, Robles creates an alternate cosmogony that neither rejects nor unquestioningly accepts Western medical discourse, nor offers up one of many parallel traditions and bodies of knowledge. These poems are written to conjure another life out of this one, a way forward despite and with the poet’s neurodivergence, sadness, depression, and anxiety. Irizelma imagines herself as the poet-alchemist in order to conjure another self in that poetic voice, one that not only survived these hospitalizations, but that found metaphor, imagen, and poetic figure in the basest of elements. It is also a voice that found gold to be as useless as it was for all who sought it, a tool of power that ultimately became dead weight in her search for a way out.