Immigration

In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic dualityof macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Unflinching, Scenters-Zapico highlights the hardships and stigma immigrants face on both sides of the border, her desire to create change shining through in every line. Lima :: Limón is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing.

The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be allegorically coded with the trans-historical consequences of an imperial sociopolitical narrative. Engaging eighteenth-century Mexican casta paintings, the morbid lynching postcards of William Horne, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas traces an aesthetic out of racialised scenes of corporeal excess. Hybrid in form, Museum of the Americas voices itself in theory, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

We used to play soccer in the monsoon rains. Through my windows, I can see acres of fields, Lying in the ruins of the wind. The poems in City of Rivers--the first full-length collection from 23-year-old wunderkind Zubair Ahmed--are clear and cool as a glass of water. Grounded in his childhood in Bangladesh, Ahmed's spare, evocative poems cast a knowing eye on the wider world, telling us what it's like to be displaced and replaced, relocated and dislocated. His poems are suffused with a graceful, mysterious pathos--and also with joy, humor, and longing--with the full range of human emotions. City of Rivers is a remarkable and precocious debut.

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English,Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun." From "Let Me Try Again": He knew we weren't Mexican. He must've remembered his family coming over the border, or the border coming over them, because he drove us to the border and told us next time, rest at least five days, don't trust anyone calling themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra. He knew we would try again. And again--like everyone does. Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

"Kith [noun] one's friends, acquaintances, neighbours, or relations. In Kith, award-winning writer Divya Victor engages Indian-American diasporic culture in the twentieth century, via an autobiographical account that explores what 'kith' might mean outside of the national boundaries of those people belonging to the Indian and Southeast Asian diasporas. Through an engagement with the effects of globalization on identity formation, cultural and linguistic exchange, and demographic difference, Kith explores questions about race and ethnic difference: How do 'brownness' and 'blackness' emerge as traded commodities in the transactions of globalization? What are the symptoms of belonging? How and why does 'kith' diverge from 'kin, ' and what are the affects and politics of this divergence? Historically-placed and wellresearched, Kith is an unflinching and simultaneous account of both systemic and interpersonal forms of violence and wounding in the world today."-

"This volume is a first collection of poems by Salvadoran-born poet, anthologist, and award-winning teacher José B. González. The poems deal with the immigrant experience and issues of identity, resilience, survival, and achievement" --