PORTRAITS AS ANIMAL: POEMS by Victoriano Cárdenas

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Description

Portraits as Animal is a gallery of self-becoming in a “sunbaked house as tiny as a heart.” With a toothy lyricism at turns sly and forthright, Cárdenas’s hunger to belong carries us from a stove “bleeding a hundred kinds of caldo” to his “determined mitochondrial ancestors''—a journey framed by generational struggles with addiction, a queerphobic church, and the always-transforming land. 

In conversation with Taos’s rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárdenas writes through his transition, acknowledging that “to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me.” Here is pain and violence, but here, too, is the assurance that we are “built for this metamorphosis” and can follow our past incarnations “over scorched earth neon with new grass” to a future of our own making.

about the author

Victoriano Cárdenas is a trans poet and native of Taos. He graduated with an MFA in 2020 from the University of New Mexico where he served as editor in chief of Blue Mesa Review and executive editor of Skull + Wind Press. His literary work has appeared in Witchcraft Magazine, Terraform by VICE, [PANK], and Quarterly West. Cárdenas co-wrote and appeared in the Audible Original Eminent Domain and currently writes for Lime Salt Productions and Meow Wolf. He lives in Albuquerque with his rescue dog, Sophie.

STOP AND FRISK: AMERICAN POEMS by Jabari Asim

NEWSWORTHY: POEMS by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton

Description

Newsworthy wrestles with living in a culture infected by white supremacy where current media is distrusted, cursory, and impossible to escape. And yet, we yearn to know. We crave a thoughtfulness—apart from soundbites and viral videos—that plumbs deeper, one that reawakens our shared humanity, reminding us that under headlines beat all of our “pierced hearts.”

A leading light in the new poetic guard, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton’s collection is a reimagining of the newspaper, collecting cutouts from the editing floor to resurrect those who would otherwise be forgotten alongside scenes from an “ordinary” family: mother, father, brother (Josh), and sister (Amandla), whose near and lived tragedies unfold against the backdrop of murdered black Americans. Amandla serves as a surrogate for all of us, regardless of skin color, morphing from naive bystander to headline, and uncovering what we should have seen all along: to be human in the world is to rectify its injustices.

With Newsworthy, Mouton brings us dispatches from the heart.

About the author

Born in Riverside, California, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-recognized performance poet and the first African-American Poet Laureate of Houston. Formerly ranked #2 Female Performance Poet in the World, she is a founding member and executive director of VIP Arts, a non-profit dedicated to promoting literacy and the arts in underserved populations. Her genre-bending poetry has engendered unconventional collaborations with groups as disparate as the Rockets and the Houston Ballet. Her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and the TEDx circuit. An opera about the life of Marian Anderson, for which she wrote the libretto, premieres at the Houston Grand Opera in the spring of 2020. Mouton lives and teaches in Houston.

GHOST OF A PERSON PASSING IN FRONT OF THE FLAG: POEMS by D.F. Brown

Description

D.F. Brown served as a medic in the Binh Dinh v province of Vietnam. With GHOST, he returns to these two places, often co-mingling them into someplace both dreamlike and known, equally combustive by the delirium of memory—“a swarm smeared across the page.” The collection calls for us to pause and remember, so that we can reckon with both the horrors of our collective past and the necessity of witness, of being there, even if we were lucky enough not to be. To respect the chaos of war and real lives that were lost, W.D. Ehrhart calls D.F. Brown’s poems “jagged, jarring, disturbing, unsettling…[t]hey confound time and geography. All the while “haunting, baffling, troubling” us, and because of their pure intentions, able to wring out beauty and redemption from even the bleakest moments, those “roses through chainlink.” John Balaban praised GHOST, as “one of the best books to come out of that war.”

 In GHOST, Brown calls upon his powers, reveling in the sanctity of language that reveals the worst in us—but also heals and transforms, reminding us that “words silhouette what we cannot keep.”

About the author

Born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks, D.F. Brown served as a medic with Bravo, 1/14th Infantry in Vietnam, 1969–70. Educated at the University of Missouri and San Francisco State University, he is the author of Returning Fire, The Other Half of Everything, and Assuming Blue.  His work has been anthologized in American War Poetry, Carrying the Darkness, and Unaccustomed Mercy. Brown lives in Houston.