Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | 811.6 SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Oakdale Library | 811.6 SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 811.6 SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | 811.6 SAN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry
The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous.
I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat.
I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning.
Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work.
What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich.
But I just nursed on this leather whip.
I just splattered my sheets with my sadness.
--from "Poem of My Humiliations"
"What is life but a cross / over rotten water?" Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez's powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border--the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.
Author Notes
Erika L. Snchez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and the author of a young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. She is a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her hallucinatory debut collection, Sánchez negotiates an imaginative space between oral history and journalistic reportage, overloading the senses as she produces "a body on the verge of fever." Sex workers, farmers, hormonal adolescents, and churchgoers populate these formally varied lyrics delivered with a whiff of magical realism. Sánchez is as capable of intriguingly surrealist gestures ("the day goes on picking/ the meat from its teeth") as of photographic depictions. Her narrative voice is perhaps most seductive when most ruthlessly sensory, describing an estranged lover's angst triggered by the odor of raw ginger, or evoking New York City streets with "the rich smell/ of baked garbage and coconut curry." Sánchez's protagonists defy expected cultural roles, braving the disapproval of patriarchs and of "ashen saints with their eyes/ rolled back in blessedness,/ whites the color of old wedding/ dresses." Ambient unease and confessional impulsivity culminate in the lush shock of "Six Months after Contemplating Suicide," in which the speaker reckons with wanting "the end// with a serpentine/ greed" and celebrates the hard-won capacity for survival. Throughout, a sense of menace pervades all the joyfully vivid detail, suggesting that only language itself provides a "brief happiness as fierce as the wet muscles of a horse." Agent: Michelle Brower, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This compelling debut recounts the experiences of crossing borders, whether by force or choice. Sánchez minces no words in challenging accepted notions of femininity, race, religion, and sexuality. Being the sensual, free-thinking daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Catholics with an undeniable work ethic and parental commitment to making a better life for their children, is a complicated business. On one hand, Sánchez expresses appreciation for their sacrifices; on the other, rebellious resentment for being born into hard-edged conditions in Chicago and raised in a roach-infested apartment, begging the question of whether seeking a better life in another country always leads to a better life. Sánchez's experience living in Spain on a Fulbright seem to free her from family restraints yet leave her still facing the same self. These blunt, brave poems also give voice to the many abused, underpaid, overworked, disenfranchised, and ostracized individuals living at the edges of our awareness. And they reveal how our animal instincts and drives, though stigmatized, will never be as base as the true beastliness of some human behavior.--St. John, Janet Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The second-person form can be both an invitation and an someone else's perspective and reckon with why, perhaps, you hadn't considered that perspective before. Some of the most powerful poems in Sanchez's lush and formidable debut use this tactic to draw readers close to difficult subjects, including her sense of dislocation as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants. In " The Poet at Fifteen," she writes: "At times when youspeak Spanish, your tongue / is flaccid inside your rotten mouth: / desgraciada, sin vergüenza." And in "Six Months After Contemplating Suicide," she describes how, "Some days you knelt on coins / in those yellow hours." Elsewhere, Sanchez's wrenching explorations of guilt and shame, grief and misogyny portray with vivid rawness the experiences of others: narcotraffickers, factory laborers and sex workers. Her depictions of misery hurt and haunt, as when she writes: "Every day after school, the factory men yell / mamacita, / making noises like sucking/ mangoes." Placed vibrantly alongside depictions of beauty and promise, these struggles achieve a "flamboyant despair" that is "soft and full / of hysterical light."
Library Journal Review
In this debut collection, Sánchez (winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and a fellowship from the Poetry Foundation) describes what it's like to be a child of immigrants, and, too often, a woman jeered at by men. Sometimes harsh, though always vibrant and superbly written, the poems chronicle what it's like to travel and live in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. The pieces recount events some would prefer to avoid; for instance, the brutal 2014 massacre of Mexican students and the 1616 Tepehuán revolt. Sánchez is also not afraid to catalog the ugly and scarred: semen, spit, mouse shit, and dead fetuses all make appearances. But how she captures the world of the senses: "Watch how I shield/ my ears from the tiny blades// of the cricket song,/ but I still love// the way the evening rages on." Written in English, with occasional Spanish phrases, this collection offers an exploration of what it is to live, love, and suffer on this Earth: "Guerra a fuego y sangre: where the bones clatter// from the sapodilla trees." VERDICT Brutal, raw, yet forgiving in the tradition of Walt Whitman, this work is not to be missed.-Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Quinceañera | p. 3 |
| Spring | p. 5 |
| Narco | p. 6 |
| La Cueva | p. 7 |
| Amá | p. 8 |
| Letter from New York | p. 10 |
| Self-Portrait | p. 12 |
| Las Pulgas | p. 14 |
| The Loop | p. 17 |
| Lavapiés | p. 18 |
| Portrait of a Wetback | p. 19 |
| Lessons on Expulsion | p. 23 |
| Hija de la Chingada | p. 25 |
| On the Eve of the Tepehuán Revolt | p. 28 |
| To You on My Birthday | p. 30 |
| Baptism | p. 32 |
| Crossing | p. 33 |
| Saudade | p. 37 |
| Orchid | p. 38 |
| The Poet at Fifteen | p. 40 |
| Kindness | p. 42 |
| Kingdom of Debt | p. 45 |
| Love Story | p. 47 |
| A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring | p. 49 |
| Girl | p. 53 |
| Juárez | p. 55 |
| Self-Portrait | p. 58 |
| Forty-Three | p. 59 |
| Vieques | p. 61 |
| Poem of My Humiliations | p. 62 |
| Circles | p. 64 |
| Hyacinth | p. 66 |
| Capital | p. 68 |
| Donkey Poem | p. 70 |
| Six Months after Contemplating Suicide | p. 72 |
