Description

What Our Bookseller Says:

“Cenzontle should be required reading. Marcelo Hernando Castillo’s verse is lyrical and airy, like the titular mockingbird. The topics, though? Far less light. This poetry deals in timely issues: borders and crossing them, namely. Fire and peaches, mothers and horses, love and mourning all come together in this book — it WILL leave you changed.”

– Terry

What the Publisher Says:

I made him a necklace out of the bees that have died in my yard. / How good it must have felt before the small village / echoed its grief in his throat; before the sirens began ringing. / How fallow their scripture. / Perhaps we were on stage which meant it was a show, / which meant our only definition of a flower was also a flower. – “Wetback,” page 31

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.