Pentimento (Joshua Garcia)

From an Italian word meaning “to repent,” a pentimento is an instance in painting when traces of an artist’s earlier decisions or mistakes are visible through the final layer(s) of paint. Using modes of confession, ekphrasis, and biblical persona, Pentimento excavates a queerness entangled in one’s faith tradition. Whether seeking to understand his relationship to god, friends, or family, Garcia interrogates questions that arise on the path to self-acceptance. In “Self-Portrait as a Virgin,” a biblical persona asks, “How else are we to take words whole / in our mouths, except as they are given?” Concerned with naming, desire, love, and belonging, Pentimento is a response to a kind of annunciation, the almost supernatural calling of the artist to find words through which the self is free to move.

"Wounds lie at the center of Joshua Garcia’s masterful Pentimento. From this scar tissue, Garcia powerfully reclaims the past as an antidote to shame, as proof of survival, in order to cultivate queer joy. Through poems honed by a quiet confidence and masterful command over the braiding of memory, Garcia charts the evolution of self-discovery and takes on Whitman’s charge to sing the body electric. These poems are corporeal, raw, aching, bold in their tenderness, gentle in their honesty. This is what I come to poetry for: vulnerability transmuted through language into divine fire."
—Jacques J. Rancourt