It's that time again at LLB2 where we celebrate Latinx poets and their books. We're well into July, but the first six months of the year were full of extraordinary books. The second half of 2024 is even more brimming with Latinx poets and their books, so I can't wait to share that list with you in December. We encourage you to buy their books, request them at your local library, or engage with their work via review or interview. We're fortunate to have Author Spotlight interviews and traditional interviews with many of these authors, so please check them out and learn more about these talented writers.
As always, I invite you to let me know if I don't already have your book on my radar for the next list. Please also get in touch if you'd like to do an Author Spotlight. Our email is letraslatinasblog2@gmail. com
January
Anhinga Press
" 'What form does colonization take?' asks Eric Morales-Franceschini, in his probing and poignant, prize-winning collection. He answers with testimony, through law, data, encounters with anti-immigrant hatred and white-supremacy, through memory, myth, movies, parentheses, footnotes, manifestos, and the rhetoric of lyrical experimentation. Perhaps the most convincing answer that Morales-Franceschini provides to the question of colonization's takes is to say that it's a Syndrome ― a pathology that destroys the colonized and the colonizer. Fanon and Césaire are models here, and so is the work of Craig Santos Perez, a fellow-poet-theorizer of the unincorporated territory. From the revolutionary spaces of Puerto Rico and the deep UnitedStatesian south, Syndrome models how an honest confrontation with the darkness that surrounds us, fused with love and a vision for something unknown and unseen, can help us survive the endless erosion of the emergency."
—Daniel Borzutzky, author of Written After a
Massacre in the Year 2018
Saddle Road Press
“In the eaters of flowers, ire’ne lara silva continually lifts the personal, the vulnerable heart and body, into the indomitable and the mythic. Turning hard-to-shake grief into human resilience and passionate commemoration (“we are eaters of time / eaters of memory eaters of beauty”), this reliably candid and fearless writer, a master of urgent anaphora and witness, addresses fellow survivors, curanderas, and family ghosts. The book’s ongoing floral conceit skillfully inks peace-granting flowers to a sense of sacred communion (hibiscus tacos!) and the necessary tenderness for getting along in this knockabout world.”
—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas Poet Laureate
End of the Line Press
“Archival and speculative, Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez’ A/An is a revisioning of the Salem Witch Trials into a portfolio of court ephemera, converging thematically despite and through its divergent forms. It’s precisely what we haven’t escaped of the Trials that blooms here: the spectacle of adjudication, the self-righteousness of the law and legibility, coloniality’s self-exception. Sovereignty is haunted: an invisable hande pushes us forthe. Gutmann-Gonzalez deftly summons the past and present’s continuity through this possible lyric alternative. A/An is a distillation, a reduction, a tincture of the ever-renewable past. Handle cautiously—this is yr book.”
—Jos Charles, Pulitzer-finalist and winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series
February
FlowerSong Press
“Brenna Womer’s Unbrained is unfettered and unashamed. The poems and essays in this passionate hybrid collection dare us to face the pus and piss along with the shame and grief that come with being human, especially a human in the hard-won body of a woman of color. With staggering honesty, Womer interrogates the self and the self’s tenuous relationship with her ever-shifting world, calling out racist microaggressions as swiftly as she calls out her own internalized racism. The haunting handwritten title piece, a photo essay, clinches the intimacy the entire book strives toward. The intimacy, the voice of a friend who is hungry to tell us the truth. And all the truth, Womer tells.”
—Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca
University of Arizona Press
“Yaguareté White, an exceptional debut by Diego Báez, weaves a narrative of belonging, exploring the intricate ties between language and identity. Báez masterfully charts a course between Paraguay and Pennsylvania, illuminating the fusion of languages—English, Spanish, and Guaraní. He refers to this linguistic blend as the ‘language of firecracker diacritics,’ a vibrant, dynamic mix that encapsulates his experiences. These poems are a testament to the power of language in shaping our sense of self and place in the world."
—Ruben Quesada, editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry
Alegría Publishing
"ÓYEME, the debut poetry collection by Nuyorican writer - Jessica Diaz, draws from her Bronx & Borinquen roots to warmly welcome her readers to LISTEN. Follow along on her introspective journey as she reflects on family, relationships, culture, love & loss and how to feel whole again despite pain, longing and insecurities that may remain. Devoted to nurturing self-love, (r)empowerment, confidence and pride in where we've come from and where we are striving to go, Diaz celebrates these lessons learned to emphasize how healing allows us to embrace our full self. This compilation is dedicated to listening to the subtle whispers of advice from our spiritual guides as well as the jarring jolts of harsh realities when life and love shout out the lessons that our heart and mind need to learn, and remember."
—Alegría Publishing
March
The University of Kentucky Press
A rare, fully realized first book that boldly summons and carefully distills the boundless possibilities of poetry, daring us to live, mourn, and play at the limits of everyday language. The music of Alvarez's muse is something to behold, whether scoring the aerodynamics of jazz or finding counterrhythms in the sonnet's pentameter. This is an unforgettable debut, a song of afterlives in the here and now, a libation for all those "forced to dance in scarcity."
—Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal
University of Notre Dame Press
"Jordan Pérez’ Santa Tarantula considers the devastating traces of gendered violence and intergenerational trauma, grief and pain, passed on from the state’s abuse, to the family, to the child’s body. But the girl at the center of these poems is no victim crushed into oblivion. She transfigures by her own alchemy. Pérez’ poems remind us there is always life, connection, and pleasure to be made anew."
—heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, author of The Inheritance of Haunting
Acre Books
"Jose Hernandez Diaz has written a new place into existence. It is disorienting, jarring, fantastical, nonsensical, and mesmerizing. . . . I found myself immersed in a place where I could send my lover flowers from the grave, where I could talk to a man with a lizard head or Quetzalcoatl at Panda Express, or listen to a skeleton in a sombrero playing guitar. I was completely absorbed and loving my new surroundings. What a delight to read this collection, to experience this strange new voice. What a singular city Jose Hernandez Diaz has invited us to visit. This a rewarding and must-read debut.”
―Rodney Gomez, author of Arsenal with Praise Song
Black Lawrence Press
Pentimento is more than a book of poems—the poems within “make reservoirs / of their own bodies.” Joshua Garcia’s graceful attention to the queer body’s task of love has made a collection where we can glimpse ourselves in the messy act of living. “I like the idea that the whole world is born from a scar,” says the poet, and despite the precarity of these origins, “let me build my love on yours.”
–C.T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking
Four Way Books
"Inside Monica Rico’s Pinion, centuries grind together inside a pinch of yeast, across slain soldiers and a pigeon dusted with coal. It’s such a dazzling braid, illuminating (and complicating) civic histories with familial mythologies, then vice versa. Rico’s prodigious gift for form includes knowing when to rupture it, like a virtuoso punctuating a masterpiece by smashing apart her instrument onstage: “Mi’jo, mi’ja, // mi vida, petunia. / I’m trespassing once // I stop moving.” Pinion introduces us to a major new lyric voice-Rico absolutely soars."
—Kaveh Akbar, Judge of the 2021 Levis Prize in Poetry
University of Wisconsin Press
“The mouth, tongue, and hand feature prominently in Hernández’s collection. Indeed, these compelling poems kiss and bite, tell startling secrets and whisper with affection. They sometimes caress and sometimes strike. What he so eloquently calls ‘the language of grief’ pulses at the body’s intersection of language and desire, ethnicity and sexuality, vulnerable youth and empowered adulthood. What a stunning debut.”
—Rigoberto González, author of To the Boy Who Was Night
April
Anhinga Press
"Suzanne Frischkorn’s Whipsaw is an astonishing run through verdant and shattered forests, transcended one temporal dimension at a time. Everything we come to know, by breath and apparition, gives way to what we pull through it, make of it. Whether harp or clasp, song or quietude, dark horse or deer’s leap, social burdens attend condolences and we sure ourselves with understory every entry a new bound. A sensational and deeply intense read, a scatter of sunrays cut through bird song great. This one cuts to the core, delivering stunning reveal. Must read!"
—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue
El Martillo Press
"Sonia Gutiérrez's poems dive into the blue/turquoise feathers of life along the border, within the cultural waves of Raza tumult and celebration; her poems strike the bone like drumsticks. These poems pat the heart like a mother's loving hand, lock arms with sisters and brothers like a fellow guerillista, she sings from the blood like the ocean waves the shore, she spirals her poetic magic until transformation occurs, and we are changed-bravo!"
—Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of No Enemies: Poems
Graywolf Press
“Rivera’s poems are beautifully and deftly crafted—some of my favorites, though, intentionally refuse sense-making, which infuses the book with a mesmerizing strangeness. I felt deeply the grief in this book. I felt less alone after reading it.”
—Eduardo C. Corral, judge’s statement for the Academy of American Poets First Book Award
Coffee House Press
“Speaking to herself through the second person ‘you,’ Rosa Alcalá opens a transom through time and space. Reaching all the way back to the ‘eyes that didn’t know what I was witnessing at five,’ the poet gathers vision and selves, memory and prophetic warning. Her attempt to ‘love the world’ helps us to see ourselves as imperfect as we started but indivisible as we might become.”
—Farid Matuk, author of The Real Horse
City Lights
"Harrison's smoke of song somehow drifts above its own finite exchange of verbs, just as Abya Yala's darkness undoes the isolation of original consciousness. . . . Harrison writes beyond the dis-appearance of poetics, where signs become therapeutic codes for experimental animals. The kindling of ash becomes something new and far from tears: we are the isthmus or what is left of it."
—Carlos Lara, author of Like Bismuth When I Enter
Homebound Publications
"And This House is Only a Nest begins with anabuelo—a grandpa—who is not the gentle sort but one that conjures up fear, anger, work, stubbornness, and resilience. Then a peek at the poet’s father, his mother, the mocosos on his street, classmates, locos sparking up joints, misinterpreted Bible passages, soccer as metaphor—realistic scenes rendered like Dutch paintings. One of the best poems references the Los Angeles Dodgers, the late innings, with 'three kids, two strikes . . .' while visiting his imprisoned father. Surrounded by troubles in the initial poems, the last poems soften into a coda that is something like a sigh, a sigh of relief leaving that “lopsided” house called childhood. Having searched for an adult man to emulate, the poet discovers, to his surprise and ours, that he has become that man, a husband, a father, a contemplative figure."
—Gary Soto, author of Downtime
Gunpowder Press
"This lyrical and well-crafted chapbook has the breadth and substance of a full-length collection. Focusing on the said and unsaid, in an imagistic and incantatory style, Fred Arroyo has written an honest yet tender examination of a father-son relationship. Steeped in the nature of his barrio, Arroyo’s poems trace the borders of land and body to tell a story of family, exile, and belonging: “There are no boundaries / save the lines on maps. // There is no time / save the eye of memory.”
—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Final Judge, Alta California Prize
Gunpowder Press
"The flowing, associative poems of The First Amelia sing with confidence and travel through the veins of memory, family, and the landscapes of Colima. Amelia Rodriguez conjures images of sparring hawks, crushed rubies, trees glassed with ice, a snared kite, and other wondrous and unique visions. She converses with the men and women of her past, and at the center is a twinned self,“two Amelias hovering / above the turning earth,”that is hungry and ever-present."
—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Final Judge, Alta California Prize
Abode Press
“Farrah Fang is the switchblade poet. Gutteral and seductive, the poetry pokes and twists at your definition of Texas, teases a trans woman out of the landmass’ girth. What do we do with the spirit-light of a trans woman when “her body is a celebration, her body is the end”? We pray with bare feet in a junkyard. We conjure a resistance and never let go. Welcome to the DNA that is a world ancient and urban. Welcome to the portrait of an earth-bound goddess strutting’ them streets.”
—féi hernandez, author of HOOD CRIATURA
May
Mouthfeel Press
In Assimilated Natives, Gume Laurel shares stories about grief and identity, about history and conflict, about the desire to find love and 'to be at home and whole in [his] own skin.' It's a rare thing to find a poet so willing to be open with his heart, so real. Laurel speaks from the border the way that many of us who carry the border within us recognize intimately–because the border never leaves us, because the border shapes the way we think and breathe and love and write.
—ire'ne lara silva, author of Cuicacalli / House of Song and the eaters of flowers
FlowerSong Press
”These days, I don’t read poetry to cry or feel helpless. I read it to feel what it feels, to live it deeply and holler its lines like some proud Caribbean woman. That’s why I’ll read anything Jennifer Maritza McCauley writes. Her poems will as soon hug you loose as shake you tight, have you popping and wincing in beats, singing all kinds of love before morning’s arrived.”
—Anjanette Delgado, Editor, Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness
Copper Canyon Press
"Positions us in the molten place where vulnerability and strength live together, writing with and into a self-awareness that manages to feel inviting, welcoming, revelatory."
—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
Deep Vellum
“Watcha ignites the poetic imagination with its self-defining ‘photographic progression’ of bilingual experience in sight and sound. At the interface where speech impersonates the attributes of contemporary Latinx visual works, Villarreal’s poems deftly code-switch between English and Spanish and spoken amalgamations that produce mesmerizing tempos, fugitive chords, and durational attitudes. With barbed humor and a critical eye, Watcha makes triumph the ‘reciprocity of energy and flow’ to relate the unfurling, all at
once, of cultural belonging, family connection, lyric intimacy, and our common indebtedness to sensation.”
—Roberto Tejada,
author of Why the Assembly Disbanded
June
Mouthfeel Press
"Gabriel Gómez’s third poetry collection, Samsara at Quantum Zeno, tests
the theory that we might stop time through profound observation and the lyric impulse. The book is a blessing of invention and hard-won insights, drawing on found language, mathematical theory, science, ancient forms, and spirituality to consider where one belongs amidst the intimate pain of personal loss and the collective revulsion of hateful politics. With Gómez’s clear vision, we find the absurd in the everyday, the cosmic in the smallest details, and our salvation in each other. The book’s first poem, “Émigré,” ends: “And I do not / I do not blossom.” But Samsara at Quantum Zeno closes in a moment of bliss, the promise of a timeless 'now.'"
—Blas Falconer, author of Rara Avis
Jackleg Press
Enter Fabulosa as you would step into a film noir, with fascination and apprehension. In Karen Rigby's extraordinary new book, poems wear a "river of black beads // down a backwards V-dress." They peel down black evening gloves and "hunt shadow in the folds." They smell of lemons in the desert and "new blood." These poems blaze with history and private anguish against a twilight backdrop. You leave Fabulosa feeling like a jewel thief who has pulled off the crime of the century. A victory of deftly executed spins and fistfuls of diamonds.
—Sharon Suzuki-Martinez, author of The Loneliest Whale Blues
El Martillo Press
“Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez’s poems are an anthem of resilience. He writes about grief with unflinching tenderness and reverence. In a world that doesn’t often give men the opportunity to be flawed and vulnerable, Hernandez offers a masterclass in being human. He describes himself as having an unquenchable thirst for love, and in All Brown Boys Get Trumpets, the reader will also embrace this beautiful thirst. Matthew Hernandez has lovingly used this poetry collection to teach Brown Boys to master flight one jump at a time, a calling for all of us misfits to soar.”
—Yesika Salgado, author of Corazón, Tesoro, and Hermosa
The Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
“So much is said and written about ‘intersectionality’ these days and always as something, like a burglar,to be ‘interrogated.’ I say leave the intersections to the academicians. Poets, like Brent Ameneyro, can be found at the crossroads—that liminal space between worlds. Life and death, memory and forgetfulness, cuerpo y alma. Ameneyro’s lush, exquisitely crafted poems don’t interrogate so much as remind us to ask—of ourselves, of the universe (observable or not)—what is it to live? Here? Now? And why bother? A Face Out of Clay is a road map, a galaxy guide, for soul travelers who ‘don’t mind tripping on the uneven stone sidewalk.’ It is not an interrogator’s floodlight but a torch held out in front of us while we journey, meant neither to blind nor to overwhelm with its own brilliance, but to help us see.”
—John Murillo, author of
Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry
As always, a sneak peak at July
(The full list for July will be available in my July-December round up.)
Host Publications
"In fragmented lyric and explosive song, mónica teresa ortiz’s poems explore catastrophe, illustrating in verse the refusal of the human spirit to submit to systems of oppression, and its undying cry for liberation. Because these are love poems, too. Singing for their beloveds, for hope, for deliverance. Singing for the afterlife, which ortiz envisions as a queer futurity in which “Nothing matters more than halting the brutal mechanizations of colonialism."
—Host Publications