MyOTHER TONGUE by
[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.
The Book of What Remains by
A sixth collection of poems by American poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz, based on the theme of borderlands.
Home Movies of Narcissus by
A first-generation Latino born in Chicago, Rane Arroyo is a leading poeta puertorriqueño and playwright whose readership transcends his ethnicity. In Home Movies of Narcissus, his fourth collection of poetry, he writes more deliberately and with greater assurance of his search for identity—both cultural/racial and gender/sexual—and his discovery of it within family and community.
Looking for the Gulf Motel by
As a child born into the milieu of his Cuban exiled familia, the first movement delves into early questions of cultural identity and their evolution into his unrelenting sense of displacement and quest for the elusive meaning of home. The second begins with poems peering back into family again, examining the blurred lines of gender, the frailty of his father-son relationship, and the intersection of his cultural and sexual identities as a Cuban-American gay man living in rural Maine. In the last movement, poems focused on his mother's life shaped by exile, his father's death, and the passing of a generation of relatives, all provide lessons about his own impermanence in the world and the permanence of loss.
Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff: Poems by
Heart Like a Window, Mouth like a Cliff is a transgressive, yet surprisingly tender confrontation of what it means to want to flee the thing you need most. The speaker struggles through cultural assimilation and the pressure to “act” Mexican while dreaming of the privileges of whiteness. Borjas holds cultural traditions accountable for the gendered denial of Chicanas to individuate and love deeply without allowing one’s love to consume the self.
Marfa, Texas by
Bracho’s impact on Mexican poetry has been compared to poet John Ashbery’s influence on American verse. Bracho’s layered, long-lined poems attend equally to sound patterns and lush, unspooling imagery.
Furious Dusk by
Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Campos's winning collection, as'a work whose five parts trace a son's efforts—only partially successful—to fulfill his father's expectations and—perhaps even more difficult—understand those expectations enough to forgive them.” The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his father's impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his father's expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man.
Little Devil and the Rose / El Diablito y la Rosa by
This bilingual poetry collection is rooted in Mexican-American history and tradition.
From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger by
Cervantes stretches the resources of language, imagery and the dialectics of love, hunger and aesthetics.
Diorama by
Diorama is both a book of poems and a performance action by the poet Rocío Cerón, who guides the reader on a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, Mexican history, and soundscapes.
Slow Lightning by
Seamlessly braiding English and Spanish, Corral's poems hurtle across literary and linguistic borders toward a lyricism that slows down experience. He employs a range of forms and phrasing, bringing the vivid particulars of his experiences as a Chicano and gay man to the page.
When My Brother Was an Aztec by
When My Brother Was an Aztec, foregrounds the particularities of family dynamics and individual passion against the backdrop of the mythological intensity of tribal life and a deeply rooted cultural history. In these distinctively voiced poems, a sister struggles with a brother’s addiction to meth, while everyone, from Antigone and Houdini to Huitzilopochtli and Jesus, is invited to hash it out. By turns darkly humorous and sensual, Diaz’s poems gather imagery and language as readily as they illuminate the intimate and engage the communal.
Tracing the Horse by
Set in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Diana Marie Delgado's debut poetry collection follows the coming-of-age of a young Mexican-American woman trying to make sense of who she is amidst a family and community weighted by violence and addiction. With bracing vulnerability, the collection chronicles the effects of her father's drug use and her brother's incarceration, asking the reader to consider reclamation and the power of the self.
Alabanza: New and Selected Poems by
Alabanza is a twenty-year collection charting the emergence of Martín Espada as the preeminent Latino lyric voice of his generation. "Alabanza" means "praise" in Spanish, and Espada praises the people Whitman called "them the others are down upon".
Scarecrow by
Taking Dante and other catalogers of failure and ruin (Baudelaire, Trakl, Rimbaud) as its guiding lights, Scarecrow charts situations of extremity and madness:'Are you / insistent? Are you dead? / Are you guilty? Has your / name been lifted, a vein / of earth from earth?'It also charts the insistence of time's passing and with it the awakening to both new and foreclosed possibilities. What will remain for us after the disaster? How will we rebuild? To whom will we address ourselves and with what voice?
Be Recorder by
Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion--against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it.
Public Domain by
Public Domain's constantly shifting formats remind one that experimentation is driven by glee at noticing how malleable the world can be. In pieces that range from introductions at a fictive poetry reading to a poem titled "Letters Are What’s in a Name," de la Torre takes us on a bilingual romp through the opportunities for form to reveal how society works.
Half of the World in Light by
For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected.
Beneath the Spanish by
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. From "'Ay Bendito, Que Vaina': Cuneiform tablet inside,The maracas pencil orality of remembered places, the night stars, the hammock, yucayequeslike beehives, a river crab came to my feet to talk with its mouth legs, trembling like castanets."
Cenzontle: Poems by
Also available as an eBook https://0-search.ebscohost.com.library.bennington.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1737624&site=eds-live
Knitting the Fog by
Weaving together narrative essay and bilingual poetry, Claudia D. Hernández's lyrical debut follows her tumultuous adolescence as she crisscrosses the American continent. A harrowing story told with the candid innocence of childhood, Hernández's memoir depicts a complex self-portrait of the struggle and resilience inherent to immigration today.
American Copia by
'Today I'm going to the grocery store,'begins this creative fusion of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. This is also the sentence Javier O. Huerta was given to write during his naturalization interview. Through poetry written in Spanish, a short play, non-fiction passages and even text messages, Huerta delves into subjects such as consumerism and health foods available only to a limited class of people. The diverse pieces and themes in American Copia pulsate with all that can be both communal and autonomous in everyday life.
The Carrying: Poems by
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance.
Peluda by
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.
The Invisible Bridge/el Puente Invisible by
A bilingual collection, The Invisible Bridge/El Puente Invisible gathers many of the luminous, deeply philosophical poems of Circe Maia
Museum of the Americas by
Winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Cornelius Eady--an exploration in verse of imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity. The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be allegorically coded with the transhistorical consequences of an imperial sociopolitical narrative.
Post Traumatic Hood Disorder by
A searing interrogation of identity, masculinity, and contemporary culture, Post Traumatic Hood Disorder's references range from Icarus to Sir Mix-A-Lot as the speaker assembles a bricolage self-portrait from the fractures of his past. Sliding between scholarly diction and slangy vernacular, Martinez's poems showcase a versatility of language and a wild-hearted poetic energy that is thoughtful, vulnerable, and distinctly American.
blud by
Tightly crafted and explosive, these poems inherit, reject, and forgive the gifts and curses of a fraught bloodline. With incantatory rhythm, blud transforms the stigmas assigned to mental illness, abuse, and abandonment. What emerges from this poetic brujería is a fierce love: for chosen family, for the hard-won home, and for the surviving self. Rachel McKibbens is a force and a beacon—our “witchy folk hero of the disenfranchised”
Fetish by
From sensual pleasures and perils, moments and memories of darkness and light, the poems in Orlando Ricardo Menes's collection sew together stories of dislocation and loss, of survival and hope, and of a world patched together by a family over five generations of diaspora. This is Menes's tapestry of the Americas. From Miami to Cuba, Panama to Bolivia and Peru, through the textures, sounds, colors, shapes, and scents of exile and emigration, we find refuge at last in a sense of wholeness and belonging residing in this intensely felt, finely crafted poetry.
The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems by
Andres Montoya's The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems evokes a world of machines and violence as it confronts and cries out against a culture that has abandoned the aesthetic of hope. His poems are stories, prayers, and letters that foster a spiritual resolve in the midst of a chaotic and concrete reality that denies the holy. Primarily urban and intensely personal, his poetry is nonetheless universal in dealing with issues of the day; race, faith, urban decay, poverty, police brutality, and the individual search for hope in the midst of despair.
A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness by
A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness features essays and poems by Cherríe L. Moraga, one of the most influential figures in Chicana/o, feminist, queer, and indigenous activism and scholarship. Combining moving personal stories with trenchant political and cultural critique, the writer, activist, teacher, dramatist, mother, daughter, comadre, and lesbian lover looks back on the first ten years of the twenty-first century.
Beautiful Wall by
Beautiful Wall takes us on a profound journey through the deserts of the Southwest where the ever-changing natural landscape and an aggressive border culture rewrite intolerance and ethnocentric thought into human history. Inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and American upbringing, Ray Gonzalez's new collection mounts the wall between the current realities of violence and politics, and a beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten past.
The World As Presence / el Mundo Como Ser by
The World as Presence/El mundo como ser showcases, for the first time in English, a challenging, bold, and vivid new voice in Cuban literature. As Cuba experiences a series of historically remarkable transitions, Morales emerges from this context to offer an incisive poetic account of this critical moment in Cuban, as well as world, history. The World as Presence/El Mundo Como Ser is both the debut of this work in any language and the first English translation of a complete Morales collection.
Patient Zero by
This second collection from Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voicesof 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.
Citizen Illegal by
Poet José Olivarez explores the story, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, and gentrifying barrios. Drawing on the rich traditions of Latinx and Chicago writers like Sandra Cisneros and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olivarez creates a home out of life in the in-between.
State of Exile by
Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Uruguay and is considered a leading light of the "Latin American Boom" generation. After her work was banned under a repressive military regime, she left her country, moving to Spain.This collection of poems, written during her journey and the first period of her self-exile, was so personal that it remained unpublished for almost thirty years. It is accompanied here by two brilliant essays on exile, one by Peri Rossi and the other by translator Marilyn Buck, who is an American political prisoner, exiled in her own land.
Cipango by
Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America - manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 military coup by Augusto Pinochet and the brutal dictatorship there - and on the violence and degradation of contemporary urban society.
The Inheritance of Haunting by
Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future.
Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses by
Each of his many chapters ( the book is a crowded village) is dealt with tenderly and humorously....If Rios' work is charming (and it is, amply), it is so in the sense of magic, where charms turn one thing to another and reveal essential truths.
Other Letters to Milena / Otras Cartas a Milena by
In this bilingual edition Rodríguez confronts pressing issues at the turn of the twenty-first century. These involve a new post-Soviet world and the realities of diasporic existence, which have a profound effect even on people like Rodríguez who have not migrated but continue to live and work in their home nation.
Lessons on Expulsion: Poems by
Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez 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.
Set This Book on Fire! by
Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in Santa Fe of Chicano and Apache descent. Baca’s work is concerned with social justice and revolves around the marginalized and disenfranchised, treating themes of addiction, community, and the American Southwest barrios.
Lima :: Limón by
In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Unflinching, Scenters-Zapico highlights the hardships and stigma immigrants face on both sides of the border, her desire to create change shining through in every line. Lima :: Limón is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing
Virgin: Poems by
Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo's debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women
Lesser Evils: Ten Quartets by
This collection of autobiographical essays deal with such topics as adolescent explorations of the opposite sex and a realization that the goals of our youth are often unattainable.
The Painted Bunting's Last Molt by
The Painted Bunting's Last Molt explores fatherhood, parenting, and separation anxiety; and the ways in which time and memory are both a prison and a giver of joy. Fifteen years in the making, Virgil Suárez's new collection uses his mother's return to Cuba after 50 years of exile as a catalyst to muse on familial relationships, death, and the passing of time.
Rebozos by
The rebozo is considered a physical manifestation of Mexican womanhood throughout every stage of life and can be used as a tool of daily labor: a sling to carry children, a shield from weather or from prying eyes, an heirloom, and even a shroud. Inspired by each painting, these poems, in both Spanish and English, are accompanied by a historical explanation of the role of the rebozo in Mexican history, art, and culture.
The Poetess Counts to 100 and Bows Out by
Ana Enriqueta Terán is arguably Venezuela's finest poet. Celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, she is almost unknown among anglophones. Until now only a handful of her poems have been translated into English, giving at best a diluted impression of a uniquely intense imagination. This bilingual edition reveals the power and beauty of this poet's Spanish poems through English versions of corresponding force. It invites readers to enter Terán's world--a world at once strongly Venezuelan and universally human, imbued with great beauty, sardonic humor, pitiless compassion, lucid wisdom, and joyful affirmation.
Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut by
A poetry collection that offers a glimpse into LA Latina life, exploring the history and lexicon of a queer Chicana, her family, and her passions.
New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña by
In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.
Thirty an' Seen a Lot by
Thirty an’ Seen a Lot is the first book of poems by the widely published San Antonio writer, Evangelina Vigil
Of Form and Gather by
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?
Purgatory by
Raúl Zurita's Purgatory, a landmark in contemporary Latin American poetry, records the physical, cultural, and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet's military dictatorship in the fiercely inventive voice of a postmodern master. This beautiful en face edition, superbly translated by Anna Deeny, brings to English-language readers an indispensable volume written by one of the most important living poets writing in Spanish today.
Unaccompanied by
This gorgeous debut speaks with heart-wrenching intimacy and first-hand experience to the hot-button political issues of immigration and border crossing.
The Rou of Alch by 
The Other Man Was Me by
A collection of poems by a San Francisco doctor of Latino origin. The subjects include: an immigrant's son discovers his cultural identity, a physician awakens to the suffering of his patients, and two gay Latinos fall in love.
