La Treintena 2025: 30 Books and Chapbooks of Latina/o/x/e Poetry
In recognition of the five years during which La Treintena has gone from a pandemic lockdown one-off to a yearly Intervenxions feature, this time we decided to open up to submissions. What you have here then is a hybrid: texts culled from among the submissions along with additional ones I felt would help round out the list. I was excited to receive texts from a range of Latina/o/x/e geographies, and this list features two poetry collections by authors living in Europe, a first for La Treintena and a reflection of the complex global maps of Latina/o/x/e self-identification. It is also important to me that I have numerous debut collections and a range of performance poetics represented, as well as self-published works and works written primarily in Spanish. In future years, I hope to include more works in Creole and Indigenous languages.
Given our current political situation in the U.S. and globally, I am grateful to have had a chance to engage with work by borderlands poets as well as Black, Queer, and Trans poets, all of whom model alternatives to our necropolitical present. Last fall witnessed the publication of the indefatigable Rigoberto González’s Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, an important institutional recognition of Latina/o/x/e poetry and a project I was honored to be involved with as both a contributor and advisor.
Still, the current moment reminds us that we must resist the hegemonic library as well as the fantasy that we can ever really be “of America” in the United Statesian sense, especially given the situation of the most marginalized and imperiled among us. As we manage the crisis moment our universities face and the silence of so many of our leaders, we need our poets now more than ever to remind us of the power embodied in our songs, beyond any state or state of things.
Courtesy of Host Publications.
mónica teresa ortiz’s book of provocations
Publish date: July 2024
Publisher: Host Publications
Texas native Ortiz writes poems that work as queer performance texts yet still make room for the self-reflexive, what the lovely “a mapmaker looks at the stars” calls:
a universe
where we have the imagination
for silence
In “poem for the Stridentists I,” the Mexican avant-garde poet Manuel Maples Arce frames a new ecopoetic imagination:
the pastoral poems are no longer // about loving rhododendrons //
but about sinking prairies // and wildfires rocketing // through our
grasslands // climate change writes its own operas // and I am just a
poet // experiencing the shift // barefoot in my father’s garden // pulling
weeds out // one by one
The power of the book comes from Ortiz’s capacity to deliver lines that read like declarations yet evoke the unsayable: In the poem “the rocks” alone, we get “queerness always feels familiar, even with strangers” and “ghosts gift us language before the tide washes out” while “parable of exile” captivates me with its ending:
be gentle with your memory
it has kept you alive
to remember that the threads of our existence are not loose
nations stapled together
And how could I not like a poem called “god is agender,” especially given how it begins:
Marx wants us to know // a commodity is a queer thing // writers want
privacy from AI // I offer sugar to my lover // in a crisp cold room near
the seashore // away from the plague // […]
Courtesy of Finishing Line Press
2. Karl Michael Iglesias’ The Bounce
Publish date: November 2024
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Milwaukee Puerto Rican poet, performer, actor, and director Iglesias informs his lyrics with the feel of urban choreographies, words elegantly nested on the page taking the shape of embodied memory. At their best, these poems ask rhetorical questions that lead us back to the body and the city as sites of possibility, even amid violence and loss, as in these lines from “We Grown”:
where does the road go from here
from the open mouth of smoke
a type of magic I spell
like a given name
Poems here become vessels for something beyond mourning, something breathless and new akin to what Ricardo Alberto Maldonado calls in his blurb for the collection “the aching geographies of diaspora.” In the memorable poem “The Altar,” Iglesias writes:
All of our guests are ghosts. A gathering of old frames
that rest cheek to cheek. If the dead can learn to live on, why can’t
we? The altar is prime real estate. The rest happens here. As if
one day, we will join the quiet rest. The altar roars as audience.
As starving stomach. No one had to die for the altar but
the altar honors the dead. More people will die and the altar
will master the grief with candles. The altar is orange with
marigolds. The marigolds are orange like an altar on fire.
Mask over an aging face. How chill masks the desert.
The way the earth covers our body. The altar is
where we meet. Where your grandpa teaches you english
and mine talks God to me in Spanish. God invented the altar.
And the altar invented the flame
and the author and the morning.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about you
asking Why is everyone dying? I gave you a candle
and you gave me a black lighter. I should not have responded
with a quiet desert.
I love moments like these or like the opening lines of “For the Scar Near My Left Eye Which Means That I Have Cousins That Love Me,” where tongues bounce their way across the page:
which means we rug burn and remember the matches which
means my cousin found his palms on my fall which means we
went to church in spanish and spoke english which means we
were bad as hell
Courtesy of Four Way Books
3. C. Dale Young’s Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems
Publish date: March 2025
Publisher: Four Way Books
This volume collects decades of work from an important figure in queer Latina/o/x/e poetry, whose work bridges formal elegance and lyric precision. The new work here displays Young’s breadth, whether addressing youthful love or exploring the natural world or mythology. Many of these poems are in tercets, a form that the poet commands, compressing maximum sonic and imagistic force, as in the opening of the poem “Demigod”:
Long before the Greeks named him Poseidon,
the Taino knew his real name was Yucahu.
And unlike the Greeks and Romans whochose a belligerent sky god hurling thunderbolts
as somehow superior, the Taino preferred
to value life over war and its resulting power.
Courtesy of Fordham University Press
4. Roberto Tejada’s Carbonate of Copper
Publish date: April 2025
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Upon a cursory reading, it would be tempting to describe Carbonate of Copper as Tejada’s most accessible book, but as always with his work, a defiant critical imagination puts pressure on the lyric and makes us question what and how we read.
The poetic exploration of childhood and memory blurs lyric and myth in poems like “January Song” and leads us to a landscape as inscrutable as it is elemental, to “before I was born” and “I came to know it was my turn now to disintegrate.”
For this Houston-based, queer, Colombian-American poet and art critic, identity is a “Remainder” and poetry matters precisely as a way of interrogating speech as both a performance and a refusal of personhood and presence (as in the poems “In Person” and “Speaking Part” or the “unsheltered” poetics of the title poem).
Though Carbonate of Copper refuses ecopoetic instrumentalization, I am struck by the mineralized social self of “Immune” (“I leave a stone now for a federation of my kinfolk”) and by how the indents of “Grassland” evoke blades of grass as the text ponders survival:
in gravel shade
casting mineral
hold given over
to whatever survives
Completed with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, this may well be the best among Tejada’s many great books of poetry, partly because of the force of its excavation and exhumation of personhood as it relates to his long-running exploration of embodied landscapes across the Americas. The play of breath is crucial in this regard as it frames the windswept and winding expanses of the book’s pages, amplified by eccentric, yet haunting imagery that foregrounds the musicality of the breath (“theremin,” “ocarina,” “octaves,” “fibers sustaining my pitch,” poems like “Chanting” and the column fragments of “Wind”). Later in the book this breath poetics opens up into a reflection on the technologies of voice, as in the stunning ending of the poem “Touchstone,” which leaves us with “each intake of breath oceanic.”
As is typical in Tejada’s work, photos frame the book: in this case of migrants and border crossings by the likes of Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and the Depression-era photographer Russell Lee. The stark black-and-white social realism of the images grounds Tejada’s breath music as an exploration of land and its bodies. The second half of the book returns us to Tejada’s native Los Angeles, where “the air irradiated” from cliffs amplifies the book’s examination of the disintegration of self in landscape. The last section finds us on the bridge between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, México, speech and embodied language once again bridging landscape as childhood and memory reappear.
In the postscript, Tejada clarifies his perspective on the Rio Grande Valley as someone not from there and he glosses the book’s title, tracing carbonate of copper’s “impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise, and systems of extraction” and connecting his search for memory to an anti-extractivist poetics, in solidarity with migrants searching for asylum across the U.S. border. He also explains the title poem and its place in a 2022 exhibition of the same name at Artpace in San Antonio curated by Jennifer Teets.
Don’t miss the queer quotidian beauty of “Time to Wake Michael.” With its vision of “coupling at the outskirts” and its at once sinuous and sinewy meditation on love and time, it reminds me of the urgency of poetry as a space of queer Latina/o/x/e radical wisdom and/as becoming. Lines I am haunted by (from the poem “Witness”):
I train the great invisible system
to make of my voice a spell
but lacking in an activity to scale
—scale magnified for audience
Photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press
5. Eduardo Martínez-Leyva’s Cowboy Park
Publish date: November 2024
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Martínez-Leyva’s debut collection is a welcome addition to a queer El Paso literary tradition that encompasses everyone from John Rechy and Alicia Gaspar de Alba to Arturo Islas and Aldo Amparán. I thought of Rechy while reading the queer cowboy erotics of pieces like “Ode to a Leather Harness,” yet Martínez-Leyva’s book also foregrounds questions of migration, as in the moving prose poem “Portrait of My Mother Studying for Her Citizenship Exam.”
Indeed, Martínez-Leyva has a gift for prose poems that balance beauty and abjection, rigor and release, desire and power—such as “Tease,” where the poet writes:
Comb the desert shrub for a piece of me. This is my love language. So talk dirty to me. Call me your mule. Señorita Tacón. Your Tumbleweed.
Especially unforgettable is the title poem, with its Gloria Anzaldúa epigraph and its confession that:
Even after all these distances, I’m still attracted to what’s damaged: a bird with a missing wing, a man who asked me to slap him during sex. He liked the same hurt he felt from his father.
And yet, if you keep on reading this “brutal” poem until the end, somehow you will find the sky.
6. Lenina Nadal’s CUCHILLOSOFT POEMS: Stories from a Boricua 90s Chica
Publish date: January 2025
Publisher: Independently published
Rooted in spoken word and Nuyorican traditions, this debut collection balances the cool and the socially engaged, from feminist graphic novel aesthetic to its invocations of Albizu Campos, Luisa Capetillo, and Pedro Pietri (the touching “Poem for My Hero Pedro Pietri”) as well as The Clash and The Cure alongside hip-hop and salsa. The opening poem “SUBURICAN” stands out with its syncopated, playfully complex evocation of a suburban, middle-class childhood on Long Island, a welcome contribution for the much-needed study of suburban Latinidades. Here, we find the suburban speaker:
wondering why I wasn’t born in El Barrio, or somewhere on la isla,
wondering why my Spanish was hushed
and identity vanished
like the grease off the hands of a lavaplatos,
Clear.
I have a hunch the Ponce-born, Harlem-raised Pietri would dig it.
Courtesy of Editorial Betania
7. Yairen Jerez Columbié’s De corales
Publish date: September 2024
Publisher: Editorial Betania
I know nothing about this author, but I was intrigued by the fact that she is Cuban writer and scholar based in Ireland and identifies as Latina/o/x/e (and Afro-), as well as by the book’s exploration of coral from a formal, ecological, and synaesthetic perspective that connects color to the sound of jazz so that a reef ecosystem becomes “jazz de caja, bombo, toms, goliat, plato crash, ride, hi hat.” Bonus points for the sonnet “Artículo peer reviewed,” where the speaker is urged to read peer-reviewed scholarship on scholars and we end up with the dazzling translingual rhyming of interviú, review, and bayú, a Caribbean vernacular coup and Spanglish ventetú.
Aunque me ha parecido insuficiente
la muestra de buzos en la interviú
cierro el journal y digo convincente:
es serio, sometido a peer review,
la misma investigación con más gente
seguramente habría sido un bayú.
Courtesy of Burrow Press
8. Connie Mae Oliver’s Dormilona
Publish date: April 2025
Publisher: Burrow Press
In my blurb for this collection I called it “a memoir in shards” and noted how a “translingual bodymind betrays both standard English and standard Spanish in the name of a ‘submerged’ language that links women and their struggles across oceans and generations.”
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and raised between Venezuela, Miami, and Chile, Oliver explores affective and psychic geographies through a hybrid form full of flowing code-switches that straddles the family scrapbook and the sleep study, channeling ancestors yet also interrogating the porosity of diasporic memory.
Moments I linger with include the line “The only Earth I have is Google” (from “Deep Fake Deep”) and the transoceanic narrative/song “Cantos de Sirenas,” which ranges from Coney Island to the Orinoco. I am intrigued by the sleep-study poetics here as it connects neurodivergence, displacement, and the translingual, as in the prose poem “En el espacio y sobre el dormido mar,” which begins “My neurofeedback technician congratulates me over the phone on the ‘optimal’ functioning of my brain” and concludes with the striking “I think of my synapses like the shivering family tree; my ancestors teaching their children how to fish, writing poems in the sand and then bashfully brushing them back to oblivion with their hands—eyes burning.”
Courtesy of The Center for Literary Publishing
9. Brent Ameneyro’s A Face out of Clay
Publish date: June 2024
Publisher: The Center for Literary Publishing (Colorado State University)
In this debut collection, poet and experimental musician Ameneyro vividly depicts a childhood between Mexico and California in everything from couplets, quatrains, and prose poetry to the indented lines of the desert lyric “Frantic Ghosts” and the bursts of text in three poems all titled “Tectonics,” one in each section of the book. Ameneyro’s musical background is evident in the verbivocovisual syncopations that propel the book forward, lending plasticity to its lyric narrative drive. The self-mythologizing of poems like “Ulysses in Puebla” is leavened throughout by irony, by moments of class and race consciousness, and by a sometimes surreal lyric pulse that extends into code switches (“played marbles / en la calle de sangre”) and moments of synaestethic vision (as in how the poem “Transcend” leads“ us off into the dark where the buzzing / manifests into a giant wingless fly”). The surreal even colors the 1990s suburban reverie “Mom Is from Wisconsin Dad Is from Mexico and I Sing,” eerily undercutting a facile politics of memory. Don’t miss “Choose Your Own Adventure,” where—as in the children’s book series of the same name—the reader is asked to make a choice of either Mexico or the U.S. and then skip ahead to another stanza.
Courtesy of Luna Brava Press
10. Dougie Padilla’s 40 Feet Down
Publish date: 2024
Publisher: Luna Brava Press
I know nothing about this poet beyond what Wikipedia tells me: He is a Chicano poet and artist from Minnesota who worked with Reies López Tijerina’s Alianza Federal de Mercedes in the late 1960s. I chose to include this collection here because I was initially struck by the beauty of the concluding poem “the begonias,” where Padilla writes a collectivity into being without sacrificing clarity or music, as in this stanza:
and now we are escaping the virus,
escaping the cities, escaping the wars against
the people. we are escaping time and its antecedents,
we are sitting here together now, waiting for dante,
for bosch, for bruegel, waiting for the dark
times to end, to end again and again.
Equally luminous is the appropriately titled “this morning my hands are made of light,” where the speaker confronts aging, the pandemic, and a sense of rootlessness in lines that flow like rivers, echoing the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen tradition that frames the collection. Beyond the agonistic self of so many socially engaged poetics, Padilla works through the self to tame it and let something else flow:
and angels, sorry to speak of angels again,
but angels are pretty much a constant now
that i live marooned inside mi casa, so tiny,
so sparse, down here near where the creek finds
its way eventually to the rio grande gorge
and the stories we told down by its wild
raging waters way last spring, the virus
unchecked then, the virus also raging
now amongst la gente.
i am growing old still, even as we speak.
they have told me to stay inside,
but my spanish is bad and now
my english is worse
and all i can see is the music
and all i can hear are the drawings
and i have no food.
and i am out of ink, out of chalk,
out of crayons.
tho i am quite surely alive.
11. Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster
Publish date: May 2024
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
“Someday I’ll Stop Killing Diannely Antigua,” the opening poem in this sophomore collection, echoes Julia de Burgos’s “A Julia de Burgos” in its violently performative and irony-laced second-person self-figuration, poised between documenting self-harm and self-forgiveness.
The Massachusetts-born and -raised, Dominican-American Antigua came to prominence with her 2019 debut Ugly Music, a book by turns observational and fragmentary that critics celebrated for its poetics of personal, familial, and social disturbance, beyond the conventions of Afro-Latina representation.
Good Monster builds on that first collection with its poems about mothers, stepfathers, breakups (a long sequence of “Sad Girl Sonnets”), and mental health, and it finds a music that is no less defiantly ugly yet often surprisingly taut: at times spare yet unsparing in its reflection on the embodiment of trauma and as such. Antigua identifies as disabled, and her work is an important contribution to U.S. Dominicana disability poetics (as in the essential work of Jasminne Mendez). Don’t miss “Epigenetics,” which explores cross-generational gender violence and trauma through the figuration of the (victimized) self as monstrous, animal even:
[..] Did he make me
a good monster or a bad one?
I can keep my cage clean,
wipe my mouth with my thumb.
Courtesy of Philosophy Media Group
12. Ashley Crooks-Allen’s The Hot Glue Gun Chronicles
Publish date: October 2024
Publisher: Philosophy Media Group
A poet and scholar of Afro-Costa Rican descent who identifies as genderqueer and pansexual, Crooks-Allen uses repetition (including anaphora and alliteration) in this debut collection by turns as a form of incantation, as a way to explore traumatic memory, and as a way to bridge queer and diasporic bridges across embodied geographies (as in the refrain “my sex bracelets are permanent” in the poem “If You Are Called to Identify My Body” or even the haiku “Cesarean”). Irreverent irony here becomes a means of returning the violence directed towards racialized (and gendered) bodies in poems such as the standout “Questions for My Immigrant Mother,” one of several poems where cross-generational diasporic histories intersect. Here, they write: “I don’t think sana sana will work on bullet wounds / bush tea won’t hide my melanin from them” and “my navel cord is buried under a mango tree in my / grandmother’s yard / and that land is calling out for me / calling me back to safety.” My favorite poem is “Front Porch Epistemology,” which reads like a manifesto and returns me to Afro-diasporic poetics as counter-institutional practice of community:
the academy doesn’t trust me
nor I it
I trust people
my people
to be experts in their own lives
Courtesy of The Head & The Hand
13. Gabriel Ramirez’s IF PIT BULLS HAD A GOD IT’D BE A PIT BULL
Publish date: November 2024
Publisher: The Head & The Hand
This long-awaited first collection from queer, Afro-Caribbean poet and performer Ramirez is a collaboration with artist Rushawn Videl-Gevonte Stanley (or Scum Lizard). Beyond the play with the titular canine persona, Ramirez’s poetry is at its searing best when it calibrates image and music into something like a glyph, as in how the effortlessly tight/smooth tercets of “I Learned to Count Salsa Steps to Laffy Taffy by D4L” strengthen Afro-diasporic bridges between hip-hop and salsa:
Summer ‘93. Mommy goes to have her thyroid checked
and doesn’t, learns I’m on the way. Celia Cruz finds Mommy
in the street and kisses her stomach. Says este niño es bendecido.
I was especially interested in those moments when the collection interrogates masculinity and/as loss (its logic and its norms), as in opening couplet of “All Bone”: “Pops died like most fathers who never apologize; / the man he could’ve been stuck in his throat.” Scum Lizard’s bright and fluid illustrations match the freshness of Ramirez’s flow, which finds its lyric heights in “Learn Your Song,” a poem that testifies to Ramirez’s ambition and potential. I was moved by its ending and return here to its startling, sustaining opening couplets:
I survived. That’s all there is to say
about the trampling. A forest or
some grand ecosystem of
machetes hidden in cheeks.
What a mouth. The beast of the beast.
Everything I am can kill me
or give another reason to operate
from uneducated fear. I’m from
where love is. Bones don’t weigh a death.
I need to have a word with all the gods
that failed me. They wear masks and
vernacular like those whose caskets I’ve prayed next to.
They feed me pitted pomegranates full of smoke. There are
no angels. Just good people and the memories they become.
14. Sandra Ruiz’s Left Turns in Brown Study
Courtesy of Duke University Press
Publish date: August 2024
Publisher: Duke University Press
While grounded in “A brown / commons” in the spirit of the late José Esteban Muñoz, what is most compelling to me about Ruiz’s hybrid collection is its commitment to “Incompletion as Verse,” as in the title of one of its poems/pieces. Blurring the line between scholarly book, fragmentary (anti-)memoir, and poetry collection, this book embraces critical becoming aligned with women/queer of color feminism and as a cross-genre, plural, and (pan-)diasporic practice (“foremothers of no singular / land”) rooted in urban class consciousness and memory (the haunting “INNER CITY JUICE BOXES”).
I was struck by how the two opening couplets of “NECROPOLITICAL FEMINISM” model a Latina/o/x/e undercommons (in Moten and Harvey’s sense) while brilliantly setting up a queer dénouement/detournement:
I loved the institution like well to water. Elongated
pulls, pauses & do-overs in displeasure & thirst. Golden
cuffs & spittle showers, hand-me-down managers & casual
chokeholds, senile leather whips & turn-page paper cuts.
Then there is the luminously jagged “TITLED TWICE (BLEMISH)” with its defiantly “hoary” and “broken” syncopations that crip time as “riff” (as in Moten’s In the Break?). Beyond the capacious and much-needed class critique of the academic left (as in the self-figuration of the unforgettable “THE EARLESS SHARK OR STILL A JANITOR'S KID” and its “I ask the left : is this the end of listening?”), Ruiz’s work insists on “afterlives” to capitalism and finds amid glitches and shards a way of interrupting the machine, sometimes veering toward concrete poetry or even a Chicago Rican choreopoetics. Exemplary in this regard is the short poem “WITH WE” with its deliciously jarring monorhymes and its endnotes performing the text’s at once raw and sedimented poetics:
could we be more than residuals of colonial-racial-
capital’s¹ folds
value-exchanges rolled & resold
retold, say consoled, in non-gold
commodities ² clasped in big bucks & non-study holds
to be some-thing, never some-one, any-thing to mold
fetish cues for the brazenly patrolled
controlled upon scold, market extolled? ³ […]
Courtesy of Space Cowboy Books
15. Pedro Iniguez’s Mexicans on the Moon
Publish date: September 2024
Publisher: Space Cowboy Books
This book of 50 speculative poems is often animated by a jagged, at times irreverent music, as in the rhyme shards of “What I Did This Summer Break; or, The Confessions of a Foreign Exchange Student.” The energy of the lines is an effective counterpoint for the long poem’s evocation of the vandalized, the desolate, the disintegrated, the militarized, perhaps reflecting something of the author’s native Los Angeles, a city that has long been stereotyped as dystopian.
At its best, the book eschews conventional word-building in favor of experiments such as the list poem “The Things That Killed Us: A History through Art” (sample line: “Renderings of soldiers vaporized in war.”) or the amusing “La Llorona Amidst the Ruins,” which updates the La Llorona folktale for our ecocidal time (“And when all was gone, / scores of small hands reached out from algae-plagued lakes”). Some pieces in the book seem more purely expository and the ending did not feel particularly resolved, yet in this kind of ambient text that may just be the idea, and I applaud Iniguez’s speculative ambition in aiming for poetics where words are ghosts that linger “long after their corporeal demise; / their bones pulverized, / their ashes scattered to the wind.”
16. Carlos Egaña’s mínima antología de la rabia
Publish date: September 2024
Publisher: Buenos Aires Poetry
I hesitated to include this book given that Egaña—a Brookly-based Venezuelan writer—is a graduate of NYU’s MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish (of which I am currently Director of Graduate Studies) and has previously been published in Intervenxions.
Ultimately, I chose it because of its playful, insightful depiction of a transnational life across Venezuela and New York. Specifically, the piece “hdp” hooked me with its intertextual dialogue with Bad Bunny and its confession that “ahora que Nueva York ha nevado sobre mí, / me doy más bien cuenta que yo soy la puta.”
17. Farid Matuk’s Moon Mirrored Indivisible
Publish date: 2025
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
This book is the fullest realization yet of Matuk’s trademark investigative poetics in terms of both affective breadth and political imagination. Matuk’s innovation is breathtaking, whether finding poetry amid a list of U.S. military aircraft or crafting short “mirror” poems, where the text seems to be reflected but in fact we realize we are always reading something different. Especially potent is the book’s exploration of the America and the Americas (Latinidad included) as a white supremacist construction that does the work of dictators (as in the infamous School of the Americas glossed in the notes to the book) and of hegemonic masculinity. A standout in this regard are the textual superimpositions of “Alpha Video Transcripts,” rooted in the Syrian and Peruvian American author’s practice of transcribing “YouTube videos of self-styled alpha masters, men who fulfill the fetish role of humiliator and dominator for consenting customers.” This aspect of Moon Mirrored Indivisible finds a humorously unsettling distillation in the “bro” (incel?) ironies of the poem “Scale Up,” where Matuk writes:
What inheritance should make me feel terribly
Enjoined to the bros of first settlement
When every day, still in their dedicated habit
For one another, men love me,
Asking about my American sentence shapes like barefoot, sweet
Thing, Proud Boys (no fap),
The NY Times? And don't these amount to nothing
But a people's bad examples
A queer counter-erotics to normative masculinism is key to the book’s decolonial politics, as made clear in poems like “Glistering,” (“Around you The masc / Worship slide is steep / And never stops”). Also crucial is Matuk’s spirit of intertextual critique and play, as the book ranges across the polemically philosophical (Hortense Spiller, The anarchist Tiqqun collective), counter-institutional visual art (the irreverent prints of Daniel Joseph Martinez, the late Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s processual text/body work, Colombian American artist Nancy Friedemman-Sánchez’s experiments with pre-Columbian Barniz de Pasto technique), and of course poets from Fady Joudah to Alice Notley and Ángel Dominguez. Matuk’s is a deliberately minor literature in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, both deterritorialized and deterritorializing as a matter of necessity and principle. In the title poem, the smallness of the immigrant emerges as a counterstrategy (“In the mirror I've said, ‘Immigrant / my name is argument, / as small as my means’"). This small yet situated critique is especially important in our present moment, which Matuk pithily diagnoses in the fascinating long poem “Arts & Craft,” somewhere between a speculative epic and a manifesto or ars poetica: “No guarantee of a systemic critique when everything / And a people need critiques by many and many.” Though there are many unforgettable moments in this book, I return to the opening half of the poem “A Page without a People”:
Trained to follow after vernacular
American loneliness, I'd pretend
The page was blank
Even as it folds
Into proximities that overwhelm
The fantasy of empty space
With all the potential for plunder
That emptiness implies
18. Harold J. Recinos’s On the Sight of Angels
Publish date: April 2025
Publisher: Resource Publications
A poet, theologian, and minister of Guatemalan and Puerto Rican descent, Recinos with a spirited and spiritual clarity, evoking the struggle and dignity of a South Bronx childhood marked by homelessness and violence. Central America and the Caribbean never far away in these poems that purport “to interfere America’s charred / kindness,” wrestling with colonialism and white supremacy (including the intra-Latinx kind). Highlights include the Pietri-worthy “Puerto Rico,” which tackles “the hate festival at Madison Square Garden” and ends up invoking “the sofrito / children of a crucified God,” and “The Den,” short and coiled lines echo Langston Hughes and Miguel Piñero in their raw barrio visions. counter-theology of poems like “Rhapsody”:
I never heard theologians
talk about barrios
where people are unconcerned
with proving the existence
of the maker of things and
the Angels the old women
see.
19. Farrah Fang’s Quererme En La Luz
Publish date: April 2024
Courtesy of Adobe Press
Publisher: Adobe Press
In this Houston-based, Mexican-American poet and artist’s debut collection, a spatial and temporal Trans poetics emerges from the hard-won awareness of life’s seasons, beyond borders and institutions, in everyday rituals and dreams that summon alternative futures. “Summer of Healing (By Dying)” both diagnoses and defies the medicalizing of Trans bodies from its harrowing opening (“The nurses inject my name into me”…), whereas “Transdanger” understands that same body as shaped by the environmental violence of colonial extraction as it has shaped south Texas (“branded in pesticides and fossil fuels”).What makes the book is Fang’s deft, political deployment of surreal imagery that remains grounded in the body and the land (“spawn / bureaucrats in my cuticles”).
As such, the book never lets us rest, veering from the socially engaged to the articulation of a new and defamiliarizing language: near the end “La Mujer Trans Y La Luna” imagines a future for the Trans woman under a new moon only to be followed by the closing necrosurrealism of “Season of Rebirth” (opening lines: “When the excavator dug its nails into my floorboards, / I guffawed my spine into Babylon and weeped limbo over my dress. / “You turned the lights off when I was still buried in someone else’s grave”). Amplified by the “witching sonidos” of Fang’s fluid code switches, Quererme En La Luz resists an essentialized body politics and urges us to reckon with a loss beyond presence: “The body is a false flag always a goliath away, always mourning” (from “Spring of Reckoning,” another standout). Don’t miss “Worm Moon Ritual,” which is dreamlike yet attuned to a baroque plenitude, and full of unforgettable lines (among them “you must pull the rotted molar from your voice” and “refract the slumber, the drainage, the smog outward / walk naked palm to palm with your convicted”). Buzzing in my head is the at once affirming and heartbreaking “Bury The Boy And Birth The Woman,” where Fang writes: “You left behind your cadaver / to float the Gulf of Mexico and / salt the soil of south Texas.” As a bonus, check out Fang’s “The State of Texas Vs. the Trans Woman,” a mic drop attuned to “hood philosophies” and “curandera blessings.”
20. Nathan Xavier Osorio’s Querida
Publish date: September 2024
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Winner of 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, this debut poetry collection shines as it reembodies landscapes, beginning across the border from the Mojave:
Hunker down, Heyzeuz, if that’s your real name,
and look closely; do you remember us?
Gutter-born barrio, quiet patch of silt
populated by your benevolent
Río Bravo, her river roots cuddling
up near Coke caps and shredded beef dripping
from corn crushed flat.
Reflecting the author’s Mexican and Nicaraguan heritage, the collection bridges the border and diasporic, evoking “how the road back to Nicaragua splits open” and finding an anaphoric music of diasporic memory is poems such as “What Do You Remember about the Earth?”:
I do not remember your grandfather and the 18-wheeler he’d drive to haul
lumber from Managua to Los Angeles.
I do not remember the family he started there in his ferocious hunt for a
son.
The poet’s resourcefulness spans extender personifications (“Querida América, our lonely days are over. /Our railroad has wilted. Our river, rotted.”) and elegant code switches, as in the poem “Ritual of Crossing,” which concludes with:
never pull the blossom of it deep
into the length of me para nunca escuchar
u oler el silencio profundo de un pasado en niebla.
Perhaps most compelling are a series of poetic “rituals” that counter extractivist logic and suggest that the titular beloved may in fact be the land. The opening paragraph of “Ritual for Erasure” perhaps comes closest to a summation of the book’s complex decolonial ecopoetics:
The extraction site is an omission: an archive of fingers missing in the
machinery, of aerosols in the lungs of the campesino. This extraction
site is the underwater sewage coursing through the city, the dust storm
roiling outside of Barstow, copy language, the bureaucracy of an email,
the eyes sucked dry of all their attention, the military base, and its
poisoned water.
21.Daniel Ruiz’s Reality Checkmate
Publish date: March 2025
Publisher: Four Way Books
Puerto Rican and Cuban Florida poet Ruiz embraces a lyric abstraction that defamiliarizes as much as it illuminates, in conversation with everyone from John Ashbery, John Milton, and Mark Strand to Nicanor Parra and Vicente Huidobro (the latter in the memorable “Master of Fine Arts,” wherein “God is an exiled carpenter” who must be properly educated and socialized). Other highlights in this debut include the irreverent android poetics of “Methinks” and the Caribbean surrealism of “Madrugada” (“800 km/hr to lick / the shoreline into shape, a giraffe’s tongue / on a tourist’s head”). Against naturalism, Ruiz’s antipoetic impulse stages something like a “Landscape of Landscapes Superimposed” (in the suggestively titled “Remnants of Empire”).
22. Aurora Levins Morales’ Rimonim: Ritual Poetry of Jewish Liberation
Publish date: November 2024
Publisher: Ayin Press
Poet and essayist Levins Morales’s first book since her essential Duke University Press reader (included in last year’s Treintena) reveals a different side of her poetics, rooted in Jewish liturgy yet bridging her Boricua and Ashkenazi cultures. Featuring striking images by a range of artists (including members of her family), the book expands upon the exploratory prose poems of 2019’s powerful SILT by turning toward poetry’s root in ancestral and communal song.
I am struck by the reckoning with settler histories in poems like “Fence Posts” and by the speculative ecologies of others like “Land Days,” all of which further the ecofeminist epistemologies of embodied land familiar to reader of Levins Morales’s influential essays. The range of her poetics extends to the transcreating of Lola Rodríguez de Tió in “Wings,” the post-Anzaldúan autohistoria-teoría of “Food As Ritual: A Brief Memoir” and haunting prayer poems such as “Made Of” (“We are not lost”) and “Reciprocity” (“You are enough”).
Neruda wishes he could have rocked an ode like the gorgeous “Hamaca,” which reclaims the indigenous hammock as part of an anticolonial and anti-ableist poetics of rest (“my Arawak shabbat”), and “Tostones,” where Levins Morales nourishes us with the wisdom of an elder:
Never, never use a tostonera,
Those wooden castanets
that make bulky, tasteless wedges.
You need a brown paper bag
from the corner grocery store,
the bottom folder over
to protect your palm.
Paper towels to drain the grease.
23. Somos Xicanas, edited by Luz Schweig, Scott Russell Duncan, Jenny Irizary, and Armando B. Rendón.
Publish date: December 2024
Publisher: Riot of Roses Publishing House
This multi-genre anthology bills itself as “An all Xicana anthology illuminating both the enduring and new Xicana identity, presence and culture,” and I indeed appreciated its impressive breadth, ranging from the well-established (Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, Ada Limon, Alma Luz Villanueva, Carmen Tafolla, Ada Limon, etc.) to less-known and emerging authors.
While I would have expected a more substantive intersectional engagement (e.g. Black, Trans) with Xicana identity, I was excited by the inclusion of disabled writers (ire’ne lara silva), performance poets (Amalia Ortiz), those writing in Spanish or Nahuatl (Xánath Caraza), and those from less represented geographies (such as Angela Trudell Vasquez, a native of Iowa). Do not miss silva’s “she said she didn’t know how to make medicine,” which proclaims:
we are in the place where there are no recipes no
instructions but where you must walk gently on
the earth and clear your eyes and do no harm and
break none of the laws of medicine
Courtesy of Chatto & Windus
24. Leo Boix’s Southernmost Sonnets
Publish date: 2025
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
The queer, Argentina-born Boix is a leading voice of self-identified Latinx literature in the U.K. and recently edited Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry. The 100 sonnets in this book work as a meditation/memoir on love and exile but also interest me for how they map what sonnet 44 calls “this English diaspora.” As I wrote in my blurb, Boix’s “cartographic sonnets give queer form to interlocking personal and social histories, making music of loss and displacement” and their “diasporic intellect summons ‘Latin America's heart’ with equal parts rigor and play in a poetics as sinuous and expansive as the ocean between us.” I am especially fond of sonnet 43 for how it uses humor and especially off-rhyme (surprising, sometimes jarring rhymes abound throughout the book) to reflect on migration and class:
At a London school with many Latinx students,
I read my poems about gay love, family and exile.
The kids listen with attention, some are fluent
in Spanish, others half-speak, and they smile.
They look at me maybe thinking of their parents
who came here, like me, and live in two languages.
They’re curious about my stories, my life in Kent,
how I write and why, my Argentinean baggage.
Then I ask them about their lives, their dreams.
They raise their hands, bursting to tell me
all about their latest ambitions, and their faces beam.
They’re eager to share their pride in their families.
A boy points at another: His father works in Parliament!
Everyone laughs. Well . . . as a cleaner, with disinfectant.
25. soledad con carne’s SFV or Die, Foo
Publisher: Lilac Press
This collection is exactly what I would expect from a self-described “casually Queer, intergalactic Oakland/Ohlone-based chicanx punk poet, working/poor multiple high school drop-out, analog zinester, co-host of the City Lights First Fridays series, poet laureate of the San Fernando Valley, and blatant smoker sharing-trauma-with-their-mother” and I’m here for it, including the supplementary Spotify playlist. With its zine-style graphics and minimal black-and-white aesthetic, the collection evokes the spirit of San Fernando Valley punk that fuels its pages. And while I enjoyed the spirit of the whole collection, “everything i learned at CSUN” is both hilarious and a mic drop I would pogo to:
modernist theories on poetry are wack (fuck john crowe ransom) comic books as literature are more interesting than Shakespeare if you skip a final, the professor might give you a C
you can write about punk academically (but should you?)
some professors might be punks (greet them with “oi”)
first-gen Filipina law students write better poetry than white men
(white men can’t write poems)
Brown men will crucify you for a white girl’s approval
MEChA is a social club not a political organization
(Chicanx means you need to be radically political,
if not, you’re just a mexican-american.)
Queer + Brown, especially Black, gets a side-eye
in the Chicano Studies department
Chicano Studies means beefing with the other Latine studies
community college is more fun
26. Iván Argüelles’s Talking to Valum Votan
Publish date: June 2024
Publisher: Beltway Editions
I am sad I never got to meet Argüelles, the late Mexican American poet who died last year at 85, having spent decades as a key figure of the small press underground doing some of the most innovative work I have come across. (Unsurprisingly, he was largely invisible within Latina/o/x/e poetry, despite publishing in the foundational Revista Chicano-Riqueña and alongside Gloria Anzaldúa, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Sandra Cisneros in Charles M. Tatum’s celebrated 1992 anthology New Chicana/Chicano Writing. I knew his work not from Latina/o/x/e Studies but from publishing my poems in John M. Bennett’s experimental magazine Lost and Found Times, which also published him.)
This book, published shortly after Argüelles’s April 2024 passing, works as an extended elegy for his younger twin brother José “Joe” Argüelles, the spiritual writer and artist, also known as Valum Votan, and it distills the elder Argüelles’s hemispheric surrealism, spanning everyone from César Vallejo (the moving “Poema humano”) to the Sicilian American San Francisco Bay Area poet Philip Lamantia.
The relationship between the twins and the fracturing and recomposing of memory animate poems with such memorable titles such as “A Imortalidade Do Meu Irmão,” “Joe Stopped On The 72nd Step I Kept Going Up the Pyramid,” and “Contemplating A Photo of Valum Votan On The 2nd Day Of His Eternity.” The Argüelles were raised in Rochester, Minnesota, movingly and complexly depicted in poems such as “Rochester: An Elegy,” “Rochester: An Introduction To Dying,” and “My Adolescence In Minnesota”—if nothing else I hope this book will lead to Argüelles’s long-overdue recognition as a major Latino surrealist (alongside the late, and also overlooked, Frank Lima) and as a defiantly uncategorizable innovator from the Latina/o/x/e Midwest, alongside such figures as Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and the late Rane Arroyo.
For a poet famous for his unapologetic, underground experimentalism, Argüelles here finds a powerful spiritual clarity and imagistic depth in poems such as the anaphoric “Today” (“that hands are shapes that remember loss / that we cannot possess whom we truly love / that the end of time is almost here”) and “Adios, Amigos” (“such was our childhood in the remote prairies / where memory wears dark winds like shrouds / wound around the indefatigable corpse”). Don’t miss “Borracho perdido (Canción para mi padre),” where indigenous Mexican histories meet “the Ojibway phantoms of Minnehaha” to the tune of the Los Panchos version of the classic Alberto Domínguez song “Perfidia,” or the gorgeous breath cosmology of “Carmen María Gómez García The Grandmother I Never Knew” with its “atmosphere haunted by the colibrí / iridescent suspended like a snapped guitar cord / where the sun should be the blackening wharf / of clouds in a symmetry that lacks order.” I return to the ending to “Ode to García Lorca”:
[…] the twins ageless as dust
each in their Mexican glyph spangled and
! what has never been and the immemorial
Stone! what is to unravel ? grasses rushing
to the never again where birth and death
remain an enigma in their inveterate vowel
27. Jonathan Fletcher’s This Is My Body
Publish date: January 2025
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Peruvian American poet Fletcher impresses in this debut collection, with its spare yet engaging narratives, its unflinching exploration of bodies, and above all, its intersectional queer, disabled, and diasporic politics. As an epileptic (and a queer), I was both amused and deeply moved by the poem “Medusa,” one among several moments of crip self-figuration in the collection:
The way you attach
electrodes to my scalp,
let them drape behind
my head, I must
look like a Gorgon.
Other highlights include the list-poem-as-queer-chronology “Evolution of an Organism” and the poem “Phineas Gage” (about the 19th century brain injury survivor who became a case study). While I briefly worked with Fletcher when I taught an online workshop for the disability poetry organization Zoeglossia in 2023, reading This Is My Body was a revelation for how self-assured and formally playful it is. Despite its brevity, this collection is a substantive contribution to Latinx crip poetics and a much-needed Peruvian American voice in this regard (along with the work of Suzi F. Garcia). Also check out the transgressive queer erotics of the poem “Stigmata” (“I’ll believe it when I finger His wounds; / then I want Him to feel mine.”).
28. Maria Aponte’s The Things That Shape Us
Publish date: August 2024
Publisher: Independently published
Nuyorican poet Aponte’s latest collection is less a traditional volume of poetry than a journal of her time as caregiver for her late husband, the poet Bobby Gonzalez, as well as a tribute to his memory and to their shared life spirit. It includes testimonios from those who knew Gonzalez as well as the story of how the couple met. Amid so much pain, Aponte brings her trademark fire to poems such as “Mami Never Spoke Spanish” with its shoutout to Julia de Burgos and its exploration of Afro-Boricua consciousness:
Loud/gritty
We sing along, dancing, snapping our fingers
All is right with the world
For the moment
On 117th Street
Running home/I sing at the top of my lungs
“Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud!”
The shift in the sofa makes the ground move
29. Steven Alvarez’s Tonalamatl: El Segundo’s Dream Notes.
Publish date: September 2024
Publisher: Calamari Archive
Framed by epigraphs by the likes of Nezahualcoyotl and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, this book expands upon the New York-based Arizona-raised Alvarez’s trademark post/neo-Chicano borderlands poetics, pioneered in 2017’s The Codex Mojaodicus, among the most visually and linguistically inventive books of poetry published in the past decade.
Presented as the fourth part of a “series of experimental borderland novels in verse” that began with The Codex Mojaodicus, Tonalamatl resignifies the titular Nahuatl’s sacred almanac as part of a digital baroque “messycano” aesthetic that leads us past an essentialized ethno-nationalist Aztlán and through a “plastic desert” of “WallMart” in bloom and toward a divinatory realm where genome, codex, and map blur into the promise of “soundsense,” poems as scores for acts and scenes of becoming” “sequence songs | senseplay | translanguaging sounds | rhythmic prophesies.” Also a scholar of borderlands literacies and rhetoric and an activist known for his
#TacoLiteracy transnational foodways project, Alvarez approaches poetry as a way of “making space social,” of finding beauty and resistance in everyday, embodied translingual practices and reclaiming (in the spirit of Ofelia García’s translanguaging pedagogy) “an inverted world of frases & prosodies.” Alvarez’s verbivocovisual imagination is often dazzling, yet the moments of the book that haunt me are those when the formal fireworks make room for shadows, resonances, and silences, where the synaesthesias of the displaced are also utopian mindscapes across spacetime’s borders: “beauty of mountain jutting from sea | here | now | eagles & seagulls & nahuas as well / never bloodbyes | never snow.”
30. Nicco Diaz’s Un Chin Chin
Publisher: Independently published
This queer Afro-Nuyorican poet’s debut blends spoken-word rhythms and confessional while experimenting with traditional rhymed forms (in the amusing “After Chaucer’s General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales,” for instance). Amid the poems about dating and romance (including the lovely bedside apostrophe “starjammer”) and struggle and survival are a playful, slightly naughty poem about Puerto Rican pastelillos and the clever “Bi Guys,” which plays on bilingualism and bisexuality and exclaims “give me love in both languages.” Also, props for the pretty cover, a collaboration with the artist Adrián “Viajero” Román.