by Rolando Pérez

Spring marks a transitional time between the greyness of winter and the brightness of summer. And in this way, this Chanoyu for Spring/Chanoyu para la primavera explores the complexity of our emotions. As Lawrence Durrell writes in Clea, the fourth and final volume of The Alexandria Quartet: “How is one to make clear a single truth about the human heart?”. The question itself exposes the paradox: it is not that we are duplicitous, but that we are multiple. Our inner lives, like Spring itself, are transitional, layered, and irreducible to a single tone.

We live, as the Chicana writer and philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, in the space between borderlands—fronteras. This means inhabiting multiple languages simultaneously, as is the case here. It is not merely about translating words or even cultures, but rather about dwelling in those liminal spaces where life is often demanding and challenging. The world has little patience for ambiguity; it demands simple answers to life’s most intricate questions. And yet, Spring is that brief interval when, if all else is lost, what remains is Pandora’s enduring hope: the ephemeral cherry blossoms yet to bloom.

“Cha-no-yu,” the Japanese phrase for “hot water for tea,” encapsulates Japanese tea ceremony, the spirit of which Peréz evokes in his limpid yet sophisticated collection of poems… In Pérez’s poetic universe, every moment matters, whether it carries weight or both “meaning and non-meaning” at once… Through his poetry, Pérez asks: what is life beyond a moment, beyond “tea / held / by / a thin little string / and / silence”?

—Publishers Weekly

Chanoyu for Spring/Chanoyu para la primavera is the second volume of the quartet Chanoyu for the Seasons /Chanoyu para las estaciones.