
This American Autopsy
Poems
Jose Antonio Rodriguez(Author)
University of Oklahoma Press
Published on 30. August 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
76 pages
978-0-8061-6396-3 (ISBN)
Description
In this powerful collection of free-verse poetry, immigrant, poet, and memoirist Jose Antonio Rodriguez encapsulates the experiences of an artist and citizen caught between two worlds. At once deeply personal and thematically expansive, these works offer a bracing look at the darker impulses of contemporary America.
Saturated with allusions to family, immigration, sexuality, and violence, This American Autopsy is also an unsettling meditation on life and death. With its provocative title, the collection calls to mind an image of our nation as a body awaiting examination to determine the cause of death. In this scenario the poet vacillates between various roles: coroner, pathologist, and the body itself.
Some of the poems in this collection look to the past: events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion or the author's first trip to an American grocery store. Others muse on more recent tragedies, including the racial violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and the illicit drug trade. A few of the poems are written in Spanish, and the volume concludes with two English translations of these poems, which the author originally wrote in his native language.
Even as he paints a vivid picture of American diversity, Rodriguez exposes the deterioration of our nation - broken promises, failed prosperity, the shattering of dreams. Intimate and urgent, these timely dispatches from the Texas-Mexico border reveal the tensions and contradictions of today's America.
Saturated with allusions to family, immigration, sexuality, and violence, This American Autopsy is also an unsettling meditation on life and death. With its provocative title, the collection calls to mind an image of our nation as a body awaiting examination to determine the cause of death. In this scenario the poet vacillates between various roles: coroner, pathologist, and the body itself.
Some of the poems in this collection look to the past: events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion or the author's first trip to an American grocery store. Others muse on more recent tragedies, including the racial violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and the illicit drug trade. A few of the poems are written in Spanish, and the volume concludes with two English translations of these poems, which the author originally wrote in his native language.
Even as he paints a vivid picture of American diversity, Rodriguez exposes the deterioration of our nation - broken promises, failed prosperity, the shattering of dreams. Intimate and urgent, these timely dispatches from the Texas-Mexico border reveal the tensions and contradictions of today's America.
Reviews / Votes
This gorgeous book is full of lyric studies of family, fallible bodies, mutable love, failures of justice. Urgent and necessary, Jose Antonio Rodriguez's poems interrogate the role of imagination in survival. . . . If you've ever bitten a prayer (or wanted to), these poems are for you."" - Traci Brimhall, author of Our Lady of the RuinsMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oklahoma
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight
109 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8061-6396-3 (9780806163963)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jose Antonio Rodriguez, Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, is the author of House Built on Ashes: A Memoir, The Shallow End of Sleep, and Backlit Hour.