Book Review of Octavio Quintanilla’s “Las Horas Imposibles/ The Impossible Hours by Rey M. Rodríguez
Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours
By Octavio Quintanilla
University of Arizona Press (2025)
Book Review by Rey M. Rodríguez
I am always curious as to how poets or writers define poetry. I once asked Layli Long Soldier, a prominent Lakota poet, and she responded:
...my favorite thing is, when you see a stretch of land with really high grasses, in late spring, early summer, let's say, and you see the wind blow across the grass, and it looks like water. There's like a silver turning as the wind ripples through it. It is my very favorite thing. No poem in the world can contain that feeling. So to answer your question, perhaps I might say poetry is not contained to the page or language, but we attempt. We make our best attempt, as poets, to work with that material of language. (Chapter House Interview)
Octavio Quintanilla’s attempt in Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours is a powerful entry point into the mystery of poetry and invites the reader to ride La Bestia, inhabit the life of an exile in the U.S., and dream of the impossible. He does so with humility and grace, which enhances the invitation and ensures that his poetry comes as close as possible to capturing that feeling that Long Soldier experiences when she watches the wind ripple across a grass field.
Octavio Quintanilla is a professor, musician, artist, and author of three poetry collections: Las Horas Imposibles | The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press, 2025), co-translated with Natalia Treviño and the winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize; The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), long-listed for the National Book Award; and If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014). He is also a visual artist and creator of Frontextos, visual art with poetry, that is found in many public spaces, such as San Antonio’s Labor Plaza and Poet’s Pointe Park. His visual work has also been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, Texas.
He is also a member of a brash and exciting group of Latino/a poets who are pushing the boundaries of U.S. poetry with their freshness, fierceness, and unique voice. There are many in this group, but I include: Jose Olivares, Ada Limon, Richard Blanco, Matt Sedillo, David A. Romero, Alan Chazaro, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Sara Lupita Olivares, Sebastian Paramo, Angel Garcia, Felicia Zamora, Rodney Gomez, Ariel Francisco, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Icess Fernandez Rojas, Angelena Saenz, Sonia Gutierrez, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Eduardo Vidaurre, Vincent Cooper, and many more.
These Latine writers often write in English and then use Spanish words throughout the text. A smaller group of writers write in English only and may have their poetry translated into Spanish. Luis J. Rodriguez, a longstanding Chicano poet, published his latest book of poetry, Todos los Caminos Llevan a Casa, in English into Spanish. Others are writing in Spanish and then translating their work into English. Las Horas Imposibles | The Impossible Hours falls into this camp.
But the bilingual nature of this book does not mean that it should be reserved for comparison to Latine poets only. Indeed, he easily fits in with Danez Smith, Layli Longsoldier, Diana Koi Nguyen, Roberto Tejada, Claudia Rankine, Victoria Chang, m.s. RedCherries, Chen Chen, ire’ne lara silva, and others. There are many reasons for his inclusion in this broader group. It arises from his desire to push the nature of poetry into his Frontextos—paintings that define poetry outside of the confines of language and incorporate visual art with his attention to craft in both English and Spanish.
Additionally, he captures the complexity and ineffable the border’s nature between the United States and Mexico from a Chicano perspective, but also from a universal one that we must all understand. Undeniably, he has the command of the craft to do it justice, employing multiple forms to convey his message from free form to various dia but even more so because Spanish and English must be employed, and translations like what Quintanilla and Natalia Treviño carry out are necessary to attempt to put into words what occurs on the border.
The first poem, Bestia/Bestia, must be in both languages to capture the horror. It is common knowledge that there are many ways to cross the border. Most migrants cross by plane, but others take trains from Central America all through the heart of Mexico. Euphemistically, the train ride is called “La Bestia,” even though it is not one train but many that men, women, and children must endure, many times riding wherever they can to avoid the gangs that prey on the migrants. Often, migrants will go to the “safest” place, which is underneath the train cars as it speeds along, headed North. Realistically, no place is safe. It is a perilous journey through Mexico’s center. The first few lines read in English and then translated into Spanish:
Le cortó un brazo
El brazo izquierdo
El brazo izquierdo quedó tendido
Entre las vías.
Se resbaló
Se resbaló y el tren le cortó la pierna.
Se resbaló y el tren le cortó
la pierna derecha.
Nadie vigila el tren/
It cut off his arm.
The left arm.
Left arm bleeding
between the train tracks.
Slipped.
He slipped, and the train cut off his leg.
Slipped, and the train cut off his right leg.
No one watches over the train.
I love that the poem in Spanish leads the collection before the English version. It signals immediately that Spanish is being honored in a world where it seems to be too easily dismissed. The experience of the exile flees from a Spanish-speaking world to an English one. The structure leads to an empathy for this bleeding person who has lost an arm and a leg trying to find liberty. The experience of reading in Spanish and English is different. There is a slight difference in meaning between “Se resbaló” and “Slipped”. A strict translation of the former would be “He slipped himself”; instead, it is translated as “Slipped”.
Of course, the translation of the poem is correct, but there is a difference in meaning between the two. One is slightly more descriptive and indicates who is responsible. He is responsible for slipping. In the English version, we only have the word “slipped”. We don’t know who until the next line. This may seem minor, but over the course of a book, these little differences add up, much like the differences add up between who belongs and who does not. Who is a citizen and who isn’t? The horror of the journey can only come close to the Long Soldier “attempt” by employing both languages and still the reader knows that the attempt is still inadequate to capture the experience of what it is to leave your country and begin again in a country that you know does not want you but is happy to use you and your desperation for its exploitation.
The attempts continue throughout the book, and they are powerful and moving, especially the use of word pictograms that play, for example, with the word, “problem[a]”. Or even two words like “tú” and “yo” hanging from a cross and being translated as “you” and “me” but in a single line “Memememememememememe | Youyouyouyouyouyouyouyouyouyou”. These wonderful word plays follow throughout the first part of the book like “Un muro siempre tendrá agujeros/A wall will always have holes,” and then we see vertical lines on the page resembling a wall with a hole in it.
I hope Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours is treated as seriously as any of our best books of poetry written solely in English. There is an important reason why this book needed to be in both English and Spanish. It takes two languages to begin to attempt to describe the experience. It also serves as an invitation to all of us to “attempt” to understand the plight, beauty, joy, suffering, and humanity of those who come to the United States for a better life. And in Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours, I hope we will all accept this invitation to understand our interconnection and our commonality with them so that we may open our hearts to find a better way to address more humanely the challenge of immigration. We must at least attempt.
Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and UC Berkeley.
