In his latest poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez interrogates questions of identity, community, and what art offers the marginalized.
The poetry collection is composed of three sections.
The first one situates the reader in a number of poems where trauma is the focus. The space is the Texas-Mexico border, where the poet grew up as an immigrant from Mexico beginning to discover hard questions about identity and belonging. The second section brings us poems about the ways that poetry can help us make meaning. The third section brings us poems that reveal the transformative and destabilizing experiences of displacements of many kinds.
This is a collection of poetry that lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of vulnerability—but also compassion.
José Antonio Rodríguez is the author of The Day’s Hard Edge. It’s published by Northwestern University Press.
