Cenzontle (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America, 40) - Softcover

Castillo, Marcelo Hernandez

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1942683537 ISBN 13: 9781942683537

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd., 2018

Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 GLCA New Writers Award
An NPR Best Book of 2018

In this highly lyrical, imagistic debut, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo creates a nuanced narrative of life before, during, and after crossing the US/Mexico border. These poems explore the emotional fallout of immigration, the illusion of the American dream via the fallacy of the nuclear family, the latent anxieties of living in a queer brown undocumented body within a heteronormative marriage, and the ongoing search for belonging. Finding solace in the resignation to sheer possibility, these poems challenge us to question the potential ways in which two people can interact, love, give birth, and mourn―sometimes all at once.

About this title

About the Authors

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of five through the mountains of Tijuana. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and earned degrees from Sacramento State University and The University of Michigan, where he was the first undocumented student to graduate from the MFA program in Creative Writing. He has received fellowships to attend the Vermont Studio Center, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He cofounded the Undocupoets campaign, which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country, and he was recognized with the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. His work has been adapted to opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya. With the late C.D. Wright, he co-translated the poems of the contemporary Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in PBS NewsHour, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, Fusion TV, and BuzzFeed, among others. He lives in California where he teaches at Sacramento State University.

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper's, The Nation, The Rumpus, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and daughter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Cenzontle

Because the bird flew before
there was a word
for flight

years from now
there will be a name
for what you and I are doing.

I licked the mango of the sun―

between its bone and its name
between its color and its weight,

the night was heavier
than the light it hushed.

Pockets of unsteady light.

The bone―
the seed
inside the bone―

the echo
and its echo
and its shape.

Can you wash me without my body
coming apart in your hands?

Call it wound―
call it beginning―

The bird’s beak twisted
into a small circle of awe.

You called it cutting apart,
I called it song.

Esparto, California

Each pepper field is the same.
In each one I am a failed anthem.

I don’t know English
but there is so little
that needs translated out here.

For twelve hours I have picked
the same colored pepper.

Still I don’t know what country
does death belong to.

My skin is peeling.

Cual dios quisiera ser fuente?

If only I could choose what hurt.
An inheritance.

Those lost mothers bound
to the future of their blood.

I am walking again through the footage
where the white dress loses its shape.

Even moving my hands to sort
the peppers is a kind of running.

Hold still.

The child will sing because I was once her flag.
She will take my picture
―both groom and bride―
a country she has never seen.

I will give her the knife
to make her own camera.

The gift of shade and water―
the likeness of a star to possess.

And I am only half sick
if being sick
is just a bone waiting to harden.

I could be a saint
since there exists no pleasure
that wasn’t first abandoned to us out of boredom.
We traffic in the leftovers of ecstasy.

How lonely and inventive those angels were.

If I could speak their language,
I would tell them all my real name

―Antonia―

And with my curved knife,
I would rid them of all their failures.

First Wedding Dance

The music stopped playing years ago
but we’re still dancing.

There’s your bright skirt scissoring
through the crowd―

our hips tipping the instruments over.

You open me up and walk inside
until you reach a river
where a child is washing her feet.

You aren’t sure
if I am the child
or if I am the river.

You throw a stone
and the child wades in to find it.
This is memory.

Let’s say the river is too deep
so you turn around and leave
the same way you entered―
spent and unwashed.

It’s ok. We are young, and
our gowns are as long as the room.

I told you I always wanted a silk train.

We can both be the bride,
we can both empty our lover.

And there’s nothing different about you―
about me―about any of this.
Only that we wish it still hurt, just once.
Like the belts our fathers whipped us with,
not to hurt us but just to make sure we remembered.

Like the cotton ball, dipped in alcohol,
rubbed gently on your arm
moments before the doctor asks you to breathe.

Edition details

• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1942683537
• ISBN 13: 9781942683537
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112