Sasha Pimentel

Searing verses set on the Mexican border about war and addiction, love and sexual violence, grief and loss, from an American Book Award-winning author. Selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series. El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across the river, Ciudad Juárez suffers a history of femicides and a horrific drug war. Witnessing this, a Filipina's life unravels as she tries to love an addict, the murders growing just a city--but the breadth of a country--away. This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much "a body will hold," reaching from the border to the poet's own Philippines. These poems thirst in the desert, want for water, searching the brutal and tender territories between bodies, families, and nations.

And Other Poems

For Want of Water

Ching-In Chen

Khadijah Queen

Addie Tsai

Ocean  Vuong

Craig Santos Perez

Kenji Liu

Jose Angel Araguz

Abigail Licad

Tony Robles

Wendy Gaudin

Ernesto L. Abeytia

Tim Seibles

Melissa Coss Aquino

Remica L. Bingham-Risher

This anthology project is dialogue, map, history - a project in response to the many questions poets of color face on a daily basis. It makes no claims of definitive stances -- simply the desire both to hear from each other and to share what we've learned, to pass on to others.

An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics: Poets' Ways of Making

Of Color

Sasha Pimentel

Books

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