Cintia Santana Receives Northern California Book Award
Cintia Santana’s poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023) received the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award. The contest’s judges write, "The Disordered Alphabet by Cintia Santana examines the personal as well as the historic by way of a dismantled dictionary, which the poet rebuilds and makes strange. The book's brilliant use of wordplay and language experimentation is announced by "Word," the lead poem: "unlocked / their wordhoard, they who / sent upon us wellcloud of / wordpour, abundance…" and the vastness of the concerns follow, "All the earth was / made wet and webbed-wide, / a well and a wellspring.…" . . . . The modes used enhance the concerns of the speaker, making for complex, curious poems that could have been written by no other poet. . . . . Santana proves an agility that goes beyond use of language, while always reveling in it."
