scenery

In scenery lyric’s public voice and memoir’s personal reconciliations confront the archives of America’s racial and legal histories, resulting in a genre bending exploration of what it means to exist as oneself for an Other. The author, a Salvadorean immigrant and parent, reflects on the status of personhood in America between racial supremacy and racial disavowal, thinking through his own structural role as a naturalized citizen, and naturalization’s historical condition in leveraging person amidst anti-Blackness. From 17th-Century casta paintings up to contemporary coverage of domestic unrest and riots, from the delivery room to scenes of parenthood, the author ponders: what is the kind of emotion a face demonstrates, or a body, an assembly? How does the immediate need of an emotion without form resist the collective public archive and its abundance of silent, static lessons? scenery approaches the empathy we come to feel when the language we’ve made is dulled by the roles we are also expected to occupy against each other.

from Fordham University Press & winner of the Poet’s Out Loud Editor’s Prize

“born to violence” in Tupelo Quarterly & “hogtied” selected by Bhanu Kapil for the TQ16 Prose Open Prize

also in the Boston Review, “autochthony: or, so goes the logic”