El Océano y la Serpiente/ The Ocean and the Serpent. Poems by JeFF Stumpo, selected as Number 7 in the Seven Kitchens Press ReBound Series. 

Publication:  August 1, 2017 [100 copies]
16 pages, plus end notes
$ 9.00

JeFF Stumpo has been a bookstore owner and a part-time professor, a slam poet and an unapologetic telemarketer. El Océano y la Serpiente / The Ocean and the Serpent was his first professionally published chapbook, written over the course of an entire year and sprung from a writing prompt in a poetry workshop run by John O’Leary at Illinois Wesleyan University. He has published a previous chapbook, The Icarus Sketches, in our Editor’s Series. His next chapbook, Against Itself Cannot Stand, is forthcoming later this summer from Seven Kitchens Press.

Taking as its setting something like but not quite the Conquista, El Océano y la Serpiente / The Ocean and the Serpent sets English and Spanish against each other, with facing pages typographically mirroring each other but acting as antagonists, not translations. JeFF Stumpo’s attempt at a 21st-century Waste Land garnered praise from critics and writers such as Felipe de Ortega y Gasca and C M Mayo but never saw wide publication. Seven Kitchens Press is delighted to give El Océano y la Serpiente / The Ocean and the Serpent a second chance via our ReBound Series.

la verdad (agua, palabras, piedras)

las palabras se mudaron

recordamos la historia
en el sonido del océano
rompiendo en las rocas

the truth (agua, palabras, estrellas)

the constellations are long dead

still we divine them in the heavens
the ocean lies beneath us 
yet colors our horizons

• Purchase JeFF’s chapbook here.