ISBN: 978-1-931010-24-5
117 pp. | paper only | $12.00

poetry by Jorge H. Aigla

The Cycle of Learning is Jorge H. Aigla’s third collection of poetry and his first completely bilingual work. It deals with the mystery of learning and the problem of internalizing awareness. Learning often takes place outside of language: through the warmth of a mother holding her son’s hand while gaping at improbable creatures in a natural history museum; through a loving son who cares for a hungry butterfly at the bottom of the Grand Canyon; through the death of a karate-do sensei. The work is also an essay in translation: poems generated in either Spanish or English, transformed by the other language, face each other across a previously thought unbridgeable page divide.

Jorge H. Aigla was born in Mexico City in 1954 and received his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. Since 1985, he has been a faculty member at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His previous publications include a translation of Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío and two poetry books, Sublunary and The Aztec Shell.