Books by Latinx Poets in 2017
This lovely list by Jasminne Mendez gave me that extra push to share her list, add ¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets to my to-buy list, and to not let this sit in drafts 99% finished.
Some books by Latinx poets (including Afro-Latinx poets) that were published this year.
Miami Century Fox by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, tr. Eduardo Aparicio (October 16) (Bilingual)
Miami Century Fox is Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s English debut, but by no means is she an emerging poet. Here’s a voice that’s seasoned and fierce, tender and sharp as a blade. I promise, dear readers, that you will not encounter another book quite like this, nor another poet quite like Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, ever again. (Achy Obejas)
Jaguar in the Cotton Field by Christine Stoddard (July 10)
I am trying to love the white in me every single day / because I fought so hard to love the brown
Genetics and the perception thereof also factor in to Christine Stoddard’s Jaguar in the Cotton Field, though in a somewhat less savage context. Focusing on the biracial female experience, Stoddard traces the outlines of her heritage and the world she navigates today; her words weave through topics including the Salvadoran civil war, Loving v. Virginia, Kim Kardashian, and the inexhaustible surge of gentrification. As it does for countless others, our current political landscape weighs heavily on Stoddard’s thoughts. While some beasts lurk in shadowy jungles, society increasingly enables many more to pursue their prey in the light of day.
Migrare Mutare / Migrate Mutate by Rossy Evelin Lima, tr. Don Cellini (June 22) (Bilingual)
This bilingual poetry collection written in Spanish by Rossy Evelin Lima and translated by Don Cellini, represents the very best of the new transnational literature in North America. In recent years the poetry of Rossy Evelin Lima has become a symbol of a borderless identity that challenges any preconceptions and aesthetic assumptions.
¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets, ed. Melissa Castillo-Garsow (April 30)
Containing the work of more than 40 poets equally divided between men and women who self-identify as Afro-Latino, ¡Manteca! is the first poetry anthology to highlight writings by Latinos of African descent. The themes covered are as diverse as the authors themselves. Many pieces rail against a system that institutionalizes poverty and racism. Others remember parents and grandparents who immigrated to the United States in search of a better life, only to learn that the American Dream is a nightmare for someone with dark skin and nappy hair. But in spite of the darkness, faith remains. Anthony Morales’ grandmother, like so many others, was “hardwired to hold on to hope.” There are love poems to family and lovers. And music salsa, merengue, jazz permeates this collection.
When Love Was Reels by José B. González (September 30)
“My parents crossed when I started losing / teeth. My memory of them is broken, chipped / away.” Expressing his longing not to be forgotten like so many abandoned children in his native country, José B. González writes about a young boy’s life first in El Salvador under the care of his grandmother and later living with his uncle in New York City in this moving collection of narrative poems that uses iconic Latin American and Latino films as a guiding motif
Notes On Losing by Cynthia Cruz (November 7)
The speaker in Cynthia Cruz’s latest collection of poems is a poet and an artist, a photographer, to be exact, seeking answers to the difficult questions about identity and femininity. She explores the angst of agency in self-portraiture and its unsettling struggle for power in the act of making the private public: “I still exist. I am here / even when you do not see me. / I am here because I say that I am.” This arresting chapbook is a taste of what’s to come in 2018: Dregs, Cruz’s fifth book of poems. (Rigoberto González)
Yaviza by Roberto Harrison (December 31)
Yaviza, the title of Roberto Harrison’s new book, is also the name of a small Panamanian jungle town with a declining population and a colonized history. Yaviza marks the end of the Panamerican Highway and hence, perhaps, of U.S. imperialist influence. Yaviza (the book) takes up a different journey-a vision quest of sorts-an act of liberatory re-enchantment. The poetry emerges out of personal, as well as political, struggle, and the book can be read as an ars poetica. But it is also a demonstration of the transformative power of language, liberated from the prosaic and wild with incantatory imagination, beckoning us into a world of “plural consciousness.”
Bilingual Press/Letras Latinas
a jury of trees by Andrés Montoya (January 25)
Unapologetic as a poet, a speaker, a thinker, a brown man in white America—this is what I remember about [Montoya] most, and reading a jury of trees brings it all back again… . Daniel Chacón’s keen editorial eye and his intimate friendship with Andrés make this posthumous collection a gift from the beyond. It is a gift to poetry, to humanity, to the world. In the way we still heed Phil Levine’s verses, or how the central valley still echoes in the poems of Larry Levis, this body of work that spans Andrés’s adult life assures that we will continue to keep the poet and the man alive in our hearts and pens for generations to come. (Tim Z. Hernández)
Matria by Alexandra Lytton Regalado (June 30)
An electrifying attentiveness to terror and to beauty animates Matria, a collection that interrogates the eternal bonds of family and the unending bloodshed in El Salvador. Vivid images and precise phrasing transform remembered and witnessed events into lyrical acts that astonish. Rain becomes ‘obsidian blades’ then a ‘rough beard’ against skin. Salvatruchas drowning another girl in Lake Coatepeque become mountains. Alexandra Lytton Regalado, like Rainer Maria Rilke, reminds us that tenderness and brutality live side-by-side. Matria is a powerful and unforgettable debut. (Eduardo C.Corral)
peluda by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (September 26)
The book explores the relationship between femininity and body hair as well as the intersections of family, class, the immigrant experience, Latina identity, and much more, all through Lozada-Oliva’s unique lens and striking voice. Peluda is a powerful testimony on body image and the triumph over taboo.
All My Heroes Are Broke by Ariel Francisco (September 15)
All My Heroes Are Broke is a poetry collection written from the perspective of a first generation American coming to terms with the implicit struggles and disillusionment of the “American Dream.” The first section takes place in New York, both implicitly and explicitly, and serves to introduce the speaker and reveal aspects of his family’s history. The second section takes place in Florida, and continues to further exemplify the speaker’s growing cynicism towards the circumstances of his life, and the peculiar atmosphere of solitude that it creates. All My Heroes Are Broke primarily uses two forms: short, image driven poems inspired by the works of Robert Bly and Po Chu-I; and longer narrative poems that reveal more personal information about the speaker, in the manner of Li-Young Lee and Frank O’Hara, allowing the speaker to project his own life onto the surroundings and the people of those larger communities.
As Though the Wound Had Heard by Mara Pastor, tr. María José Giménez (September 14)
Words rarely fail us. Rather, it’s often the other way around. A poem like Mara Pastor’s “Man” reminds me of how much we undercut and burden them with the task of unidirectional sense-making. It lodges in my mind—parasitic, tapeworm-like—for its odd humor, unsettling ambiguity, and refusal to budge. “The Busts of Martí” is a comedic take on polyvocality. María José Giménez’s translations capture the quirks of Pastor’s playful sensibility, and what ensues is buoyancy. (Mónica de la Torre)
Litane by Alejandro Tarrab, tr. Clare Sullivan (August 26)
From the moment I first came into contact with Alejandro’s poetry, it impressed me—something here is taken to its furthest consequences: a certain overlapping of planes of language and planes of reality that, on the one hand, depict a landscape or a physical environment, and on the other hand, sketch out the distinct nervure of mental landscapes that eventually converge into a space, into a Mexico, into a city that is in some sense derealized. (Raúl Zurita)
My Lai by Carmen Berenguer, tr. Liz Henry (September 26)
My Lai is first a document. A testimony to an era that touched us differently depending on our different circumstances. But being a document does not necessarily make it a book of poetry. More than anything, My Lai is poetry, and in my judgment, first-rate poetry that adopts a conversational 'American’ style of a certain density. This can be seen in the book’s language and its marvelous structure—the interspersed quotes, the internal movements of each text, the beat which goes dim and then radiates, the agony which doesn’t fall into the funereal pomp of rhetoric, the deep disquiet facing a personal, national, and universal era and history—in My Lai, all of this is recovered in the beautiful progression of the voice of Carmen Berenguer, a fundamental poet in contemporary Spanish-language poetry. From the singular experience that spans from the late 60s to the early 70s, she makes us relive an idealism, an anti-materialism, and an urgent sense of liberty that, more than a utopia, is a real possibility. This is an essential book to enlighten new generations about a living era that has so much to offer.
The Last Cigarette on Earth by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (September 13)
A gay Latino’s intimate journey through addiction, human desire and broken love. Winner of the Pen/Faulkner and Lambda Awards for Fiction (2013), this is Saenz’ first book of poems in years. Eileen Myles, Poet and Novelist, says of this collection: “Benjamin Alire Saenz’s poems are ballads. They’re stories but they also have a whiff of the life sailing by from the car just passing with the radio on. It’s music in stores selling stuff and suddenly it’s inside your heart too painful to ignore. I love the honesty of this work and the sharp sweet reminder that we pick up art, our own and other people’s (including their tattoos) same way birds hold onto something inside and out to fly forward. His tunes are wild and brave.”
Beneath the Spanish by Victor Hernández Cruz (October 10)
Beneath the Spanish tracks the way that languages intersect and inform each other, and how language and music shapes experience. Moving across landscapes from Puerto Rico to Manhattan to Morocco, these poems are one man’s history and a song that begs to be performed.
Transnational Battle Field by Heriberto Yépez (September 19)
Tijuana writer Heriberto Yépez writes work that is full of anger, critique, and questions for writers and other citizens of the first worlds. Transnational Battle Field, which collects much of the work that he has written in English over the last fifteen years, is both a wake up call and a call out. He takes no prisoners as he takes on not just NAFTA and the US-Mexico border but also first world luminaries such as Amiri Baraka and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Essential reading for those trying to figure out the role of culture in the revolutions to come.
blud by Rachel McKibbens (October 17)
Chicana poet, activist, and witchy folk hero of the disenfranchised… . [McKibbens] creates these spaces of witness with her feral and boundary-pushing poems that speak unflinchingly of topics often swept under the rug: rape, domestic violence, body shaming, mental illness, prejudice. (Ploughshares)
Patient Zero by Tomás Q. Morín (April 4)
This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices—of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing.
Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora (September 5)
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind.
Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and “the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.”
Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey (September 12)
The existential magnitude, deep intellect, and playful subversion of St. Thomas-born, Florida-raised poet Nicole Sealey’s work is restless in its empathic, succinct examination and lucid awareness of what it means to be human.
The ranging scope of inquiry undertaken in Ordinary Beast—at times philosophical, emotional, and experiential—is evident in each thrilling twist of image by the poet. In brilliant, often ironic lines that move from meditation to matter of fact in a single beat, Sealey’s voice is always awake to the natural world, to the pain and punishment of existence, to the origins and demises of humanity. Exploring notions of race, sexuality, gender, myth, history, and embodiment with profound understanding, Sealey’s is a poetry that refuses to turn a blind eye or deny. It is a poetry of daunting knowledge.
The Codex Mojaodicus by Steven Alvarez (June 27)
The Codex Mojaodicus collects three novels-in-verse —“My Sweet Conquistador,” “Chaley Way,” and “The Pocho Codex” — all of which mine, mime, record and disgorge the impressions and dissertations of language as it is uttered, stuttered, and felt in a variety of tongues and heads. In these theatrical poems, Alvarez documents a multilingual field, tracing a Xicano genome over and above
Small Fires by José Angel Araguz (May 1)
In Small Fires, José Angel Araguz engages personal mythologies of the self, culture, and place. The crucible of Mexican-American identity is on display: poems about feeling the need to hide one’s Spanish and family history live alongside those dealing with reclaiming and owning one’s language and life. At the center of this collection is a series detailing a divorce where heart and heritage clashed and forged a new beginning. Whether creating a fable of a man who tries to walk across Texas only to turn into a mesquite tree, addressing issues of domestic violence experienced both in childhood and as an adult, or catching up with La Llorona in cafes, saloons, and movie theaters, these poems move with the urgency of the present moment and the intimacy of memory and imagination.
MyOTHER TONGUE by Rosa Alcalá (June 15)
[Alcalá] uses empty spaces, hesitations and semantic difficulties to address mothers and daughters, herself as mother and herself as daughter, and the messy emotions and miscommunications that move between languages (in her case, English and Spanish), as well as between and within female bodies, in breastfeeding, menstruation, giving birth. Alcalá’s short, wry lines, self-interruptions and open spaces remind us how little precedent there is for honest writing on these topics, compared with the epic traditions of fathers and sons. (Stephanie Burt, The New York Times Book Review)
mxd kd mixtape by Malcolm Friend (November 15)
In his debut chapbook mxd kd mix tape, Malcolm Friend offers us a speaker on the fringe of becoming. If he were a superhero this would be his origin story. The musicality & rhythm that is promised in the title more than delivers, but what Friend also delivers on are poems forged within the many rooms of his identity. & these rooms are decorated with poetic craft & a keen knowledge of the songs that have shaped him. This collection, & Friend are a valuable addition to America’s poetic landscape. I look forward to many more work from this fresh new voice. (Yesenia Montilla)
Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez (July 11)
“What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border—the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.
Drums for a Lost Song by Jorge Velasco Mackenzie, tr. Rob Gunther (March 15)
Drums for a Lost Song (Tambores para una canción perdida), Jorge Velasco Mackenzie’s tale of José Margarito,“the Singer,” escaping from slavery in nineteenth-century Ecuador, combines elements of Ecuadorean history, magic realism, and the African Yoru pursued through the landscape and the towns of coastal Ecuador by his master, Captain Manda, with an entourage of servants and slaves that includes Margarito’s lover, Pan de los Pobres; Lupina, a witch; Ochumare, the deity of the rainbow, god and goddess in one, whom Manda has also enslaved; and a notorious criminal from nineteenth century Ecuadorean history.
The narrative ranges through an array of adventures historical and otherwise: from the 16th century shipwreck that established a settlement of runaway slaves, to an escape via submarine, Ecuador’s civil wars, the tale of the goddess Iris-female manifestation of the rainbow deity (who may or may not be the Singer’s mother); meetings with the gods; a great banquet of Indians, soldiers, gentlemen and beggars; and the return of Halley’s Comet. In Drums for a Lost Song we encounter the cruelty of slavery, the exhilaration of adventure, dialogue that makes characters come to life, and the possibility that Margarito’s song—embodied in his story—may not be lost forever.
I Love My Women, Sometimes They Love Me by Cathy Arellano (June 23)
In these pages, Cathy Arellano portrays the lovers we’ve been and the lovers we’ve had. We haven’t always been fair; they haven’t always been kind. Arellano leads us through much travail, often with playful rhythm and rhyme, as she illustrates desire and disaffection in lesbian relationships. These poems do not guide how to do relationships as much as warn against the obvious and the ambiguous landmines embedded within. These poems compel us to consider what we keep at bay, for the poet knows actions and feelings must be acknowledged if they are to be altered, if we (and our liaisons) are to be transformed. In this collection, Arellano rips off her máscara and removes ours stanza by stanza.
Bridge of the World by Roberto Harrison (October 1)
Bridge of the World maps multiple transits between mental, spiritual, and geographic topographies, pivoting on the experience of dislocation from Panama and Latinidad. This is a journey over bridges between inner and outer worlds, between the cosmic and the material, the past and the present, and the immediate and memory. Traversing is bound up in the alienations of migration, economic disparity, the violations of capitalism, and the cosmic betrayals in the struggle to hold onto love in the place of rage. Harrison’s is a poetics that explores psychological fragmentation as the natural condition of a life lived suspended in multiple in-betweens. Place is colossal, mundane objects swell with symbolism, time and memory warp, and plague the mind and poetry with visions. These poems are glutted with the revelation and pain that braid themselves through the poet’s living—a brave and undulating work that invites us into a love defiant and resolutely alive.
Tropico by Marcela Huerta (October 1)
Marcela Huerta’s debut collection of poetry tackles grief, memory, and the experiences of a second-generation immigrant. The daughter of political refugees from Chile, Huerta shares memories of her recently departed father, who becomes a symbol for Chilean culture and leftist resistance after his passing. Through the intimate detailing of everyday occurrences, Tropico reveals how intergenerational trauma disrupts childhood and lays bare the lived effects of American imperialism.
No, Dear/Small Anchor Press
Caljforkya Voltage Joshua Escobar aka DJ Ashtrae (September)
Joshua Escobar aka DJ Ashtrae makes poetry into a kind of music. He mixes family drama with travelogues, interviews about the HIV epidemic with biographies of Mexican immigrants, the lyrical with the actual, English with Spanish. Caljforkya Voltage records his imaginary journey through a dreamy dystopia known for its heat, far from the ocean and fueled by the shipping industry, a dystopia based off of his beloved hometown, San Bernardino.
Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (September 21)
Beast Meridian is a fierce incantation, harnessing the intuition and intelligence of personae navigating a “melancholy galaxy” full of the violences of societies and families, in which the pain of the earth and the pain of the body are not separate. In languages of tenderness and weaponry, landscapes and bodyscapes, insight and foresight, talismanic memories and imaginings, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal constructs layered complications to see newly into, or grieve not being able to look beyond. Far from surrender, the poems write toward a communal resilience: “entre todas las mujeres we kneel to push away the final night”—a unity among wounded women, their collective mythology infused with necessary interrogations and radiant intensity, as they (and their words) “spill & spill until we spread / like a flood.” (Khadijah Queen)
These Days of Candy by Manuel Paul López (November 15)
In his latest book, These Days of Candy, Manuel Paul López writes: “I’m a mouth with your laughter trapped in me.” That laughter is streaked with “tears,” “dried fireflies,” “blood,” and “long inspired verses.” Walt Whitman may have contained multitudes, but López brings us “The Warriors” (there are dozens of them, all memorable), “Mouse Pad Becky,” “Radio Mind,” Mr. Signal,” “The Saddened Man,” and “the superhero towel”– determined, defiant, and stunted individuals whose voices (the ones Mr. “White” Whitman ignored) are shrill, sharp, sensuous, and snappy. They bounce us around the expanding universe of warehouses and vacation hideaways, as they burrow into our lives, persistent as worms. “I am disoriented from the daily blood donations extorted from the body via black and white bloodmobiles.” Lopez’s poems are “a walking coagulant,” a “One angel wheelbarrowed inflation,” and a “Global Positioning System.” The only way to release the laughter is to read Lopez’s testimonies, as necessary as the poisonous air that we have to breathe. (John Yau)
You Da One by Jennif(f)er Tamayo (July 15) (Reprint with new poetry)
“I am addressable”—Jennifer Tamayo’s You Da One, is a maliciously filial exploration of packaged familial relations. Professional Detail: suggest face-to-face interplay with the severed head of Gwenyth Paltrow in Se7en. Is that your daughter? Is she a box? Tamayo posits a slick surface of home and determinate location only to scrape it through a landfill of epistolary detritus, Spanglish, and pop music. Daddy-daughter playtime becomes a sweet serial narrative, caught and unraveling on the jagged edge of obedience. There is no manicured heaven here, nor any logic of quotation, simply the primordial spit of techno-banality from which emerges the thrill of the partial. Look into those $50 bona fide baby blues: you (the one) you’re on a lawn, your hand is in a bowl of grapes. Look at the camera, darling, smile for Mommy in your best interior composition! (Trisha Low)
Northwestern University Press
The University of Hip-Hop by Mayda del Valle (January 15)
The University of Hip-Hop is a love letter to the city of Chicago, or, more specifically, to Chicago at a particular moment in the poet’s life. It is a meditation on movement and migration that asks what it means to leave home, how to take home with you, and how to build a new home elsewhere. These poems invoke nostalgia tempered with the knowledge that one cannot return to the past. They employ tonal and structural variations that account for said nostalgia without risking naïveté, taking all the influence of that time (hope, youth, love, music, art, and engagement) as a formal device, yet one filtered through the condensation of a current, more mature and nuanced understanding. The worldview learned then is employed in the now and frames the approach to the work, moving through formal registers that include spoken word, American lyric and narrative traditions, experimental thrusts, and documentary honed with the edge of hip-hop.
Quiéreme by Juliana Delgado Lopera (March 25)
There’s really no literal translation of “Quiéreme”; it’s in between “like me” and “love me” but, unlike in English, the verb does all the work—it’s all in one word: a command packed with feeling; a want; a little ball full of longing. And that’s basically what this book is: a little thing full of longing (and essays). In Spanglish. From loving imaginary people in Catholic school, to waiting for a lover’s tears at the airport, to documenting post-breakup grief, Quiéreme is a call on all the lingering ghosts of loving.
Corazón by Yesika Salgado (November 16)
Corazón is a love story. It is about the constant hunger for love. It is about feeding that hunger with another person and finding that sometimes it isn’t enough. Salgado creates a world in which the heart can live anywhere; her fat brown body, her parents home country, a lover, a toothbrush, a mango, or a song. It is a celebration of heartache, of how it can ruin us, but most importantly how we always survive it and return to ourselves whole.
precis by José Felipe Alvergue (February 7)
The border is a policed realm, neoliberal market, an affective landscape of spectral echoes, a geography of traces. The death of a girl, a crossing narrative, media static of late-century rhetoric on border bodies, precis involves poetry in mapping the Mexico/US border and its relationship to America, while resisting the urge to impose definitiveness. precis simply asks: What about the body? What about the personal and the communal? The reader is asked to follow along without forgetting that overshadowed in every moment of the known, every authorization of what is, there is a print or silence asking what should also be.
Shadowboxing by Joseph Ríos (October 3)
Borrowing the poetic language found in boxing lore and in the Rocky films, Shadowboxing pieces together a poetic portrait of Josefo, a Chicano adolescent working and becoming a poet in the farm territories of Central California. Rios confounds the relationship between author, speaker, and subject within various forms and, at times, across genre. He challenges the usefulness of poetry and stands upon oral histories to demystify California’s overlooked labor class. Rios invites the reader to enter Josefo’s world of memory, experience, and talk, of packinghouse mentors, storytelling grandmothers, parable-sharing plumbers, smooth talking truck drivers, and infinitely patient literature professors.
La Comandante Maya by Rita Valdivia. tr. Margaret Randall (October 9) (Bilingual)
Who was Rita Valdivia? In October 2017, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death in Bolivia, occasion for tributes throughout the world. Margaret Randall defies the absence of women’s stories in Che’s myth, bringing us the brilliant poetry and powerful personal history of this woman who died in combat just after her 23rd birthday. In a pre-feminist era and before she was 17, Rita named and escaped domestic violence. Not yet 20, she wrote poems that continue to astonish. At 22 she assumed a leadership role in Bolivia’s Army of National Liberation (ELN), the fighting force that took up the struggle for freedom where Che left off. La Comandante Maya reveals the life and legacy of one of the many women involved in an effort that, up to now, has publicized only a token female presence. Read testimonies of Rita Valdivia’s remarkable life by those who knew her best, and be astonished by her unique and lyrical poetry in bilingual format.
Crossing the Border by Daniel A. Olivas (November 17)
From acclaimed fiction writer and book critic, Daniel A. Olivas, comes his first collection of poetry, Crossing the Border. These narrative poems delve deeply into the many ways we cross borders of race, culture, language, religion, and privilege. With humor and pathos, Olivas draws from his own life and from the stories of others to serve as a witness to the great variety of experiences that make us human. With grace and eloquence, he invites readers to cross these borders with him on this intense but necessary journey.
Malak by Jenny Sadre-Orafai (September 28)
Malak is an invocation of past and future. With familial lament and childish wonder, the words lay tribute to the infinite—to the beauty in descent and the heartache that binds us to place. To our smallness in death and the importance of conjuring anew.
Beasts Behave In Foreign Land by Ruth Irupé Sanabria (April 11)
Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s second collection of poetry, Beasts Behave In Foreign Land examines the internal landscape of a family confronting the psychological and emotional aftershocks of genocide and exile. Drawing on her personal experience during Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), these poems emerge from the defining moment in which she had the opportunity to testify in the trials against the Fifth Army Corps in Bahia Blanca, thirty-seven years after soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned her parents. Weaving metaphor, ekphrasis, and voice, Sanabria’s poems pay tribute to the ways women in her family use art, music, and testimony to process the unspeakable and confront profound loss. Written in two sections and set in various cities throughout Argentina and the United States, the poems in Beasts Behave in Foreign Land explore the insistence and resiliency of love.
The Bosses by Sebastian Agudelo (October 15)
Agudelo’s books have always been concerned with the relationship between worker and consumer, whether in the kitchens or in the neighborhood, but in The Bosses, his spectacular third outing, Agudelo’s sharp focus finally lands on the seen and unseen authority figures who dictate the boundaries of our lives, contemplating power structures from the current managerial culture to a historical exploration of the role that authority plays in our lives.
messy girl by Ariana Brown (November)
messy girl is a chapbook of poems about depression, heartbreak, femininity, & healing—an attempt at unraveling the lies I inherited about womanhood & required suffering. in the spring & summer of 2014, I could barely hold myself together. recovering from a messy break-up & constant financial stress left me ashamed at how “not okay” I felt, all of the time.
I wrote poems as a way to document, because I was afraid of disappearing into my own silence. three years later, I know these poems were written by a girl who alone insisted on her own survival, despite her impossible circumstances. I have excavated, re-purposed, & added new work to these poems in the hopes that you find them healing, too.
Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares by Christine Stoddard (November 25)
A collection of powerful poems from Christine Stoddard dealing with trauma and mythology through a familial lens.
A Short Tablature of Loss by Rodney Gomez (March 21)
Selected by Ron Mohring and Eduardo C. Corral as Number 5 in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series.
Scar on / Scar Off by Jennifer Maritza McCauley (October 9)
Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off runs the borderlands of mestiza consciousness, by turns neon-lit and beating, defiant and clashing, searching and struggling, in fistfuls of recognition, in constant pursuit of intersections and dualities. Drawing on Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and the inspirations of her late friend Monica A. Hand, through polyglossia and hybrid text, McCauley evokes vividly the relationships between psyche and city, identity and language. In the rhythm and snap of these poems and fragmentary stories, we find echoes of Sarah Webster Fabio, Beyonce, flamenco, Nikki Giovanni, street slang, danger and hope. This is a profound collection, a rebel language..
Hands That Break and Scar by Sarah A. Chavez (August 15)
In language that is both achingly honest and meticulously poetic, Chavez chronicles the passage from childhood to young womanhood in California’s Central Valley, negotiating culture, language, identity, sexuality, love, and meaning. It is not that these poems reveal the secret profound nature of things—in Chavez’ world, the lines blur between violence and love, joy and struggle, memory and transcendence, the sacred and the mundane. One thing flows into another and back again. Hands That Break & Scar will leave an indelible mark on your heart, reminding you that poetry, beauty, and life are everywhere—within and without. (ire'ne lara silva)
Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems by the Girls of Our Little Roses, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, ed. Spencer Reece (October 15)
Over twenty-five years ago two Americans, Dr. Diana Frade and her husband, Episcopalian Bishop Leo Frade, founded Our Little Roses Home for Girls in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Until then abandoned girls were often given to prisoners since no such homes existed. Now Our Little Roses has some 60 rescued or orphaned girls in a city once considered the “murder capital of the world.” Poverty and violence—especially in the past 25 years attributed to deported Los Angeles–based gangs—has affected the lives of all in the poorest Spanish-speaking country of the hemisphere. Unaccompanied youth from Honduras were among the 100,000 refugees, which also included children and youth from El Salvador and Guatemala, arriving to the United States between 2013 and 2015. American poet and Episcopalian priest Spencer Reece spent two years at Our Little Roses teaching poetry to girls who have lost family due to poverty, violence, and disasters like Hurricane Mitch that struck Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala in 1998, resulting in 22,000 people dead or missing, 2.7 million homeless, and $6 billion in damages.
This book has essays by Reece and Luis J. Rodríguez as a backdrop to the girls’ voices, and a foreword and afterword by poets Marie Howe and Richard Blanco. Luis and his wife Trini, a poet, teacher, and indigenous healer, also helped teach at Our Little Roses and the Holy Family Bilingual School inside a walled compound in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Here poetry and stories transcend the pain of loss that often goes unexpressed. Here poetry serves as a beacon of hope and inspiration in the shadows. Here poetry can save lives.
The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United State, eds. Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar (April 15)
Tia Chucha Press is proud to present an anthology of Central American writers living in the United States. It features work that captures the complexity of a rapidly growing community that shares certain experiences with other Latino groups, but also offers its own unique narrative. This is the first-ever comprehensive literary survey of the Central American diaspora by a U.S. publisher, perfect for high school, college, or university courses in U.S. literature, Latino literature, multicultural studies, and migration studies.
A multi-genre collection—including poems, short stories, essays, memoir or novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction—the book showcases writers who render a multiplicity of experiences, as refugees from the wars of the 1980s to those who barely remember the homeland or who were born in el norte. There are writers from both coasts and from the middle. Their aesthetics range from hip-hop inflected to high literary to acrobatics in Spanglish. Yet it is a community that shares a history of violence—both here and back home—and the hope and healing that ensures its survival. They include migrants or children of migrants from countries in the so-called Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—considered one of the most violent places on earth, as well as from Belize, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panamá.
The Easy Body by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta (June 19)
The Easy Body is a love letter from hell. In these poems, a fiery account of loss combines with a multi-lingual prophecy of stained, stunning beauty. In deep suffering and impure solidarity, the Latinx, matrilineal, colonized body of this text will never be ‘easy.’ Get ready for the birth of a riot and the death of the world.
Killing Marías by Claudia Castro Luna (October 11)
In Killing Marias, each poem is a rosary bead named after a woman’s life in Ciudad Juarez. Each bead reveals a crack of light through which we can peak into the hurt so many women experience from birth to death. Castro Luna’s piercing voice states “exploitation has no limits,” and that “man’s hypocrisy even less.” She dares us to stop being mediocre humans, especially men, and let the “feminine thrive.” (Javier Zamora)
The Happy End / All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre (April 1)
The Happy End/ All Welcome is set in a job fair inspired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika: the largest theater company in the world is recruiting all kinds of employees. De la Torre builds, fastens, cuts, pastes, performs, and extrudes a variety of poems to suit this most serious situation comedy: poems as job interviews, poems as postings, poems as questionnaires, reports, speeches, lyrical rants… At its heart, this playful bricolage explores the norms of the workplace and its notions of competence, while tackling office design, performativity, and skilled vs. deskilled creative labor.
I Remember Nightfall by Marosa di Giorgio, tr. Jeannine Marie Pitas (August 1)
I Remember Nightfall, the first comprehensive collection of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio’s work to be published in English translation, is made up of her first four book-length poems: The History of Violets(1965); Magnolia (1968); The War of the Orchards (1971); and The Native Garden is in Flames (1975). Di Giorgio’s writing transforms everything it touches—a lily, a head, a hare, a ghost, a porcelain cup. All becomes beautifully and violently intertwined, dead and alive. Boundaries are blurred: an eagle drinks tea with a mother, a flower puts on the longest pearl necklace or kills you. Di Giorgio’s obsessive, magical gardens serve as a stage for the ongoing encounter of nature and the supernatural. These serial prose poems explore memory, family relationships, erotic desire, and war, animating a world that is always on the verge of explosion.
University of Arizona Press
Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut by Vickie Vértiz (September 26)
Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut uses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time with a sense of compassion for the hard choices we must make to survive. Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.
University of Arkansas Press
Paraíso: Poems by Jacob Shores-Argüello (December 1)
Paraíso, the first book in the new CantoMundo Poetry Series, which celebrates the work of Latino/a poets writing in English, is a pilgrimage against sorrow. Erupting from a mother’s death, the poems follow the speaker as he tries to survive his grief. Catholicism, family, good rum … these help, but the real medicine happens when the speaker pushes into the cloud forest alone.
In a Costa Rica far away from touristy beaches, we encounter bus trips over the cold mountains of the dead, drug dealers with beautiful dogs, and witches with cell phones. Science fuses with religion, witchcraft is joined with technology, and eventually grief transforms into belief.
Throughout, Paraíso defies categorization, mixing its beautiful sonnets with playful games and magic cures for the reader. In the process, moments of pure life mingle with the aftermath of a death.
Protection Spell by Jennifer Givhan (February 15)
In Protection Spell Jennifer Givhan explores the guilt, sadness, and freedom of relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on for no reason other than love, the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life and to each other despite the pain (or perhaps because of it). These poems reassemble safe spaces from the fissures cleaving the speaker’s own biracial home and act as witnesses speaking to the racial iniquity of our broader social landscape as well as to the precarious standpoint of a mother-woman of color whose body lies vulnerable to trauma and abuse. From insistent moments of bravery, a collection of poems arises that asks the impossible, like the childhood chant that palliates suffering by demanding nothing less than magical healing: sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanas mañana (the frog who loses his tail is commanded to grow another). In the end, Givhan’s verse offers a place where healing may begin
University of Notre Dame Press
Of Form & Gather by Felicia Zamora (February 28)
Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Echoing the collection’s provocative title, final judge Edwin Torres writes: “Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolution—the poem’s breath, the poet’s body—passing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage.” Privileging journey over destination, Zamora’s poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things. Edwin Torres continues: “This is quietly revolutionary work… . A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement.“ With the publication of this volume, the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, now in its seventh edition, emphatically makes good on its aim to nurture the various paths that Latino/a poetry is taking in the twenty-first century.
annaxmalina
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
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