Bachelor

In Bachelor's opening poem, Gustavo Hernandez writes "I often stand right here and wonder about my voice. What it is now." The "here" in Hernandez's poems is opalescent: the physical and spiritual footprint of the family home; the wide wake of loss; the stillness of guarded detachment; and the threshold of new love, of the future. In these liminal waystations, the voice of Bachelor's speaker reaches out to love, passion, heartbreak, inheritance, familial responsibility, and legacy. Many of the poems in this collection share titles: "Bachelor," "Husband," "Son," "Nocturne," "Conclusion." Each of these words becomes a paradigm that Hernandez mines in his compressed and focused style, each a different interpretation, a facet of the consummate bachelor trying to reconcile the recollected past with the rapid pace of the present tense, trying to establish and maintain connection, trying to comprehend relation and condition.