Heartwrecks

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Musical notes, paint pigment, and lives of the heart converge in fantastical worlds of invention. Nicolas Destino's adventures through relationship, music, and visual art revitalize the lyric and reimagine the ordinary. This is HEARTWRECKS.

"There is music on every page. Each poem is filled with chiasmi and a desire to articulate an almost productive pain. The lines move forward and embrace themselves at the same time. Readers are engaged, distanced. Nicolas Destino invites you to listen to 'the cello [that] sweeps along the corner of an ear' and near his personal history like 'a craving cartographer / not far away.' These poems refuse to let go once they '[arrive] today as / heartwrecks.'"—Nicholas YB Wong

"Destino is creating his own music here: with engaging patterns and repetition of words, fables, and surreal transformations, urban domestic scenes, imagined landscapes, or out in space with the stars. His poems are quiet, romantic and playful as he invites you into 'marvelous reconstruction' with an orchestral soundtrack of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Corelli."—Andy Quan