Bücher der Reihe Andres Montoya Poetry Prize

The poems in Santa Tarantula grant an urgent and haunting voice to the voiceless, explore ancient narratives, delve into Cuban history and identity, and confront trauma and violence.Jordan Pérez explores the tension between fear and reprieve, between hopelessness and light, in her debut collection, Santa Tarantula, the tenth winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Pérez lends voices to the forgotten: to the political dissidents, gay men, and religious minorities imprisoned in the forced-labor camps of 1960s Cuba; to biblical women who were deemed unworthy to name; to survivors of sexual violence who grapple with paralyzing fear and isolation.With rich detail, these poems weave together the stories of those who go unheard with family memories, explore moments of unspeakable tragedy with glimpses of a life beyond the trauma, and draw out what it means to be vulnerable and the strength it takes to endure. Santa Tarantula pushes through the darkness, cataloging unspoken pain and multigenerational damage, and revealing that, sometimes, survival is in the telling.

My Kill Adore Him is a collection of poems from Andres Montoya Poetry Prize-winner Paul Martinez Pompa. With a unique, independent voice, Martinez Pompa interrogates masculinity, race, language, consumerism, and cultural identity in poems that honor los olvidados, the forgotten ones, who range from the usual suspects brutalized by police to factory workers poisoned by their environment, from the victim of a homophobic beating in the boys' bathroom to the body of Juan Doe at the Cook County Coroner's Office. Some of the poems rely on somber, at times brutal, imagery to articulate a political stance while others use sarcasm and irony to deconstruct political stances themselves.

Filled with the nuanced beauty and complexity of the everyday-a pot of beans, a goat carcass, embroidered linens, a grandfather's cancer-A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying journeys through the inherited fear of creation and destruction. The histories of South Texas and its people unfold in Laurie Ann Guerrero's stirring language, including the dehumanization of men and its consequences on women and children. Guerrero's tongue becomes a palpable border, occupying those liminal spaces that both unite and divide, inviting readers to consider that which is known and unknown: the body. Guerrero explores not just the right, but the ability to speak and fight for oneself, one's children, one's community-in poems that testify how, too often, we fail to see the power reflected in the mirror.

Tropicalia is a collection of poems by Emma Trelles, winner of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. The book is a melodic union between the green insistence of the subtropics and the city ensconced within. Trelles's language is detailed and startling, her poems infused with color and light, and the secret beauty of back alleys and parking lots is seamed to sorrow, hope, and land. Rock bands play among odes to Lorca and Chagall, and the hard news of protest and war lives among the simple pleasures of words and sky."e;Tropicalia borrows its title from the Brazilian art movement of the same name, a vibrant blend of genres and styles that colored the international arts scene in the late 1960s and 1970s. Edgier and more savvy than the flower-power hippie culture of its neighbors to the north, its vast creative energy drew from many different sources to shape a new hybrid most strongly felt in music, but also visual and performance art, poetry, film, and fashion. As mirror, Tropicalia the book brings a similar energy into the mix. Trelles imbues her odd brew of poetic styles and voices with a strong visual sense. The result is a narrative infused with a powerful physicality of place."e; -from the introduction by Silvia Curbelo, 2010 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize judge"e;True to the musical movement of its namesake, Tropicalia is a unique fusion of sounds, sights, and textures that entrances the reader into a dream-state. Like a deja vu of the soul, the physical and emotional landscapes these poems render so precisely feel at once familiar and yet like completely new worlds in which I find love, meaning, and resolve for the first time, again. 'Beauty is better felt than seen,' Trelles writes, and it is true: Tropicalia is not a book I merely read, but felt word by word; not poems I merely pondered, but experienced syllable after precious syllable."e; -Richard Blanco"e; 'Everything looks better in a poem, / or worse, depending on how much of the day you were able / to hoard'-That's a typical flash of wisdom from a poet who is herself a hoarder of images, a beautifier of the Miami streets she lyrically documents. I love the immediacy and gusto of Tropicalia. I am thankful that it is 'thankful to be standing / in the heat watching egrets.' The world may not always 'look better' in Emma Trelles's poems, but it is a better place for all lovers of poetry, thanks to her rich and heartfelt book."e; -Campbell McGrath"e;In Tropicalia, Emma Trelles gives us Miami-the flora, the fauna, the languages, the interstate. Her poems are luxurious and scrumptious, socially relevant, with oomph and sizzle. The buoyancy of her images and the poignancy of her direct language make Trelles the most exciting poet to emerge from the state with the prettiest name."e; -Denise Duhamel"e;In the poem 'Nocturne in Parts,' Trelles writes 'There is something all-powerful and holy / about a cold orange. Imagine peeling / each day into one flawless strip."e; This gorgeous description of how the divine may perceive the passing of time is convincing, yet false when considering the fruit that is this fibrous and sweet debut collection of poems. Amid interstates and wet grass, saints and devils, protests and surrenders, Trelles exists as an eye-a recurring image in the collection-giving credence to a Florida alien and true. Rather than a contiguous peel, this collection is more like the pile of bright rinds one finds between their feet after feeding ravenously."e; -Kyle G. Dargan, author of Logorrhea Dementia: A Self-Diagnosis

The Outer Bands is a first collection of poems from Andres Montoya prize-winner Gabriel Gomez. The book is an expansive examination of language and landscape, voice and memory, where the balance between experimentation and tradition coexist. The poems realize a reconciliation between the writer's voice and the voice of witness, wonder, and tragedy; a dialogue between two worlds that employs an equally paradoxical imagery of the American Southwest and the marshes of Southern Louisiana. The book concludes with its namesake poem, "e;The Outer Bands,"e; a twenty-eight-day chronicle of the days between Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which together decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005. The sequence poem, a pastiche and re-contextualization of images, news blurbs, and political rhetoric, travels and responds in a spare subjectivity to the storm. Gabriel Gomez completed it during a two-month emergency residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute after his home in New Orleans was destroyed.

"In Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes meditates on migration, and the American dream. He reminds us that Blackness is everywhere, persevering against erasure and violence. This collection is a satisfying and essential second book that leaves us excited for all that is to come from this poet." -Yesenia Montilla author of The Pink Box

Winner of the 2018 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.

Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Echoing the collection's provocative title, final judge Edwin Torres writes: "e;Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolution-the poem's breath, the poet's body-passing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage."e; Privileging journey over destination, Zamora's poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things. Edwin Torres continues: "e;This is quietly revolutionary work. . . . A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement."e; With the publication of this volume, the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, now in its seventh edition, emphatically makes good on its aim to nurture the various paths that Latino/a poetry is taking in the twenty-first century.

Pity the Drowned Horses, winner of the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. Sheryl Luna's poems are about place, family and home within the broader context of the border as both a bridge and a barrier. The bilingual and bicultural city and how a place is longed for and viewed very differently as the observer changes and experiences other cultures.

Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Campos's winning collection, as "e;a work whose five parts trace a son's efforts-only partially successful-to fulfill his father's expectations and-perhaps even more difficult-understand those expectations enough to forgive them."e; The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his father's impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his father's expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man.