Books
“In his first volume, J. Michael Martinez attempts the impossible–he excises nostalgia, peers through wolf skin, conquest and god. A mind devouring tour-de-force.” –Juan Felipe Herrera
Purchase:
LSU Press, Amazon, Tower Books
IN his award-winning first book, J. Michael Martinez reenvisions Latino poetics and its current conceptions of cultural identity. In Heredities, he opens a historically ravaged continental body through a metaphysical dissection into Being and silence. The hand manipulates a surgical etymology through the spine: the longitude where “history gathers in the name we never are.” The poems seek to speak beyond codified aesthetics and dictated identity politics in order to recognize a territory of “irreducible otherness” where the self’s sinew may be “reeved through revelation” and where, finally, one finds “obscurity bonded to light.” This stunning collection heralds the arrival of an important new voice in American poetry.
“The reader is invited to resituate how they read, how theysee, to relearn how identity is spoken, expanding modernity’s articulation of history. .
What is agreed upon is the call for the Latin@’s ’poetic self to be an actor in the making of history’”
–from LaChiPo: a Decolonial Poetics
The first issue of Breach is a feature by the LaChiPo collective–over the Fall of 2009, these artists collaborated on a manifesto trying to answer the question of contemporary Latin@ identity. This issue of Breach features their responses. Contributors include:
- Carmen Calatayud
- Cynthia Cruz
- Danielle Cadena Deulen
- Blas Falconer
- Carmen Gimenez Smith
- Gabriel Gomez
- Roberto Harrison
- Juan Felipe Herrera
- Sheryl Luna
- J. Michael Martinez
- Valerie Martinez
- Paul Martinez Pompa
- John-Michael Rivera
- Roberto Tejada
- Rodrigo Toscano