Jess Eternamente Fraga

Liberation with a Memory Jess Eternamente Fraga

In exploring memory, Jess Enternamente Fraga does not allow memory to confine or define her. The poems in Liberation with a Memory do not come from a place of nostalgia, nor deal with the disillusionment that nostalgia often creates in the soul. As she writes "No apologies, no regrets." Jess's memories liberate her from the past, a past that often seeks to restrict, as past experiences reimagined often do by frustrating our attempts at self-understanding. In exploring those indelible memories that help to define who we are, she finds that, by writing "of them" in beautifully crafted verse, she releases herself from the power they hold over her consciousness. Throughout her marvelous collection, Jess also experiments with language, as filtered through her memory, so it might explain how "it is impossible to relieve those memories / and stay detached.... Immune," yet continues to remind us that, "What if is a dangerous game." Her poems want to explore but not regret, past experiences, past loves, that past first kiss.-Mario Rene Padilla