While Notre Dame Press is known for thought-provoking theology and in-depth philosophy, we publish a wide range of books on many different subjects. Alongside our scholarly titles are creative writing books, especially poetry. We have a stunning array of award-winning poetry books from Latino poets.
Experience hurricane stricken Cuba trying to heal inside and out as her people bear the weight of colonization and tropical storms alike in Victoria Castelle’s The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes. Listen to the ghosts of Columbians speaking their history through generations in heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’s The Inheritance of Haunting. Hear the survivors of multigenerational trauma and their experiences in Jordan Pérez’s Santa Tarantula.
Each title shows us the poet’s unique perspective, weaving identity, imagery, and experience into collections that speak to the eternal nature of inspiration found in the written word. We look forward to the next book of poetry and celebrate the titles we have to share with you now.
Pity the Drowned Horses is the winner of the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. This collection is about place and many of the poems in it are set in the desert southwest on the U.S./Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Sheryl Luna’s poems are about family and home within the broader context of the border as both a bridge and a barrier. They deal with the bilingual and bicultural city and how a place is longed for and viewed very differently as the observer changes and experiences other cultures.
“[A] heartfelt testimony from the borderlands, the place where music clanks like chains as history simultaneously crumbles and rebuilds itself, where weary dancers laugh anger away. …a triumphant debut and worthy of keeping company with the classic titles of border literature. Luna proves herself a leader among the next generation of Chicano poets.”
—El Paso Times
The Outer Bands is an expansive examination of language and landscape, voice and memory, where the balance between experimentation and tradition coexist. Gabriel Gomes realizes a reconciliation between the writer’s voice and the voice of witness, wonder, and tragedy; a dialogue between two worlds that employs an equally paradoxical imagery of the American Southwest and the marshes of Southern Louisiana. The book concludes with its namesake poem, “The Outer Bands,” a twenty-eight-day chronicle of the days between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which together decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005.
“Gabriel Gomez . . . inventively makes audible what is ultimately ‘inaudible for poetry’ from the transformations of glaciers to the vows of retablos, from the power of song to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.”
—Latino Poetry Review
With a unique, independent voice, Paul Martínez Pompa interrogates masculinity, race, language, consumerism, and cultural identity in My Kill Adore Him. These poems honor los olvidados, the forgotten ones, who range from the usual suspects brutalized by police to factory workers poisoned by their environment, from the victim of a homophobic beating in the boys’ bathroom to the body of Juan Doe at the Cook County Coroner’s Office. Some of the poems rely on somber, at times brutal, imagery to articulate a political stance while others use sarcasm and irony to deconstruct political stances themselves.
“Paul Martínez Pompa deconstructs with a deft sword. Straddling literary strategies, no supposition nor paradigm is safe. He slays the stereotypic dragons within as well as without, putting popular culture, elegy, nightmare, personal narrative, identity and gender politics in the same hat, and drawing from the source, Pompa plays a poetic hand for keeps. Every turn of trope is more delightful than the last—a breakaway collection from an exciting new writer.”
—Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of Drive: The First Quartet
Tropicalia a melodic union between the green insistence of the subtropics and the city ensconced within. Emma Trelles’s language is detailed and startling, her poems infused with color and light, and the secret beauty of back alleys and parking lots is seamed to sorrow, hope, and land. Rock bands play among odes to Lorca and Chagall, and the hard news of protest and war lives among the simple pleasures of words and sky.
“It is rare when a book is both thought provoking and tantalizes the senses. Emma Trelles’s Tropicalia is one such book. . . . True to the multi-faceted arts movement for which it is named, Trelles’s words evoke various degrees of citrus, bloom, and color.”
—Gently Read Literature
Filled with the nuanced beauty and complexity of the everyday—a pot of beans, a goat carcass, embroidered linens, a grandfather’s cancer—A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying journeys through the inherited fear of creation and destruction. The histories of South Texas and its people unfold in Laurie Ann Guerrero’s stirring language, including the dehumanization of men and its consequences on women and children. Guerrero’s tongue becomes a palpable border, occupying those liminal spaces that both unite and divide, inviting readers to consider that which is known and unknown: the body. Guerrero explores not just the right, but the ability to speak and fight for oneself, one’s children, one’s community—in poems that testify how, too often, we fail to see the power reflected in the mirror.
“In poems crafted with tremendous skill, Laurie Ann Guerrero’s A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying explores, so often, the ways in which the colonized or poor or brown have been brutalized, and their stories written by the conquerors. But the wonderful discovery one makes while reading what’s often painful and heartbreaking is that Guerrero’s the one telling us. In other words, the re-writing is begun. This is a powerful, necessary book.”
—Ross Gay, author of Bringing the Shovel Down
The poems in Furious Dusk sift through the speaker’s past to find the speckles of memory that highlight the pressures to fit the mold of masculinity forged both by the Mexican culture of his father and the American culture he inhabits. The problematic norms of both rip the speaker in two directions as he recounts his father’s severe parenting, as he explores the inability to father a child, as he witnesses human suffering, as he overeats and confronts the effects on his body, and, finally, as he realizes what it means to transcend these expectations. The speaker’s epiphany frees him to reject masculine stereotypes and allows him to see himself simply as a human being. Through David Campos’s bold imagery and accessible language and themes, he memorably adds to the continuing conversation of the effects of cultural expectations on the children of immigrant parents.
“This is a fearless poetics—no heroes, no myth-making, no jazzy lingo games. David Campos is intent on one inner phrase: ‘I will become the fire.’ I applaud David’s first book. It is relentless in wrestling the darkness, reminiscent in some ways of Delmore Schwartz, Joan Larkin, and Victor Martinez. A tour de force, a rare heart of raw light.”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, California Poet Laureate
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? 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 words on the page and the world we inhabit as both humans and things.
“With its measured and continual revelation, Felicia 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. . . . This is quietly revolutionary work that throws a gauntlet to the social diaspora. A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement by breathing in a simultaneity of opposing forces—as tectonic plates of hearing that create fissures inside the unfolding kinetic.”
—Edwin Torres, judge of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
The Inheritance of Haunting 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, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life—a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin.
“A brutal, but necessary, unveiling of violence and the ghosts we carry with us daily, The Inheritance of Haunting sings the unbearable and still makes a claim for survival. These are intricate poems that are odes to the women who have come before us, odes to the women who have been silenced by fear, and odes to the ‘wreckage of centuries.’ With language that is alive, inventive, sound-driven, and ricocheting with power, this is a fierce and breathtaking collection that risks calling for a great reckoning with our collective past.”
—Ada Limón, current Poet Laureate of the United States
Stepmotherland is a tour-de-force debut collection about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.
“In Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes teaches us the complications of love, whether it comes in the form of romantic passion or unrequited patriotism. But this is also a view of the many permutations of manhood, all of its beauty and even its bruises—and sometimes under the makeup, we find both.”
—A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste
The poems in Santa Tarantula grant an urgent and haunting voice to the voiceless, explore ancient narratives, delve into Cuban history and identity, and confront trauma and violence. With rich detail, Jordan Pérez weaves together the stories of those who go unheard with family memories, explore moments of unspeakable tragedy with glimpses of a life beyond the trauma, and draw out what it means to be vulnerable and the strength it takes to endure. These poems push through the darkness, cataloging unspoken pain and multigenerational damage, and revealing that, sometimes, survival is in the telling.
“Jordan B. 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