The Day's Hard Edge
Poems
Published on 31. July 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
88 pages
978-0-8101-4725-6 (ISBN)
Description
A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity
In his fourth poetry collection, JosE Antonio RodrIguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker's world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker's initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one's very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.
In his fourth poetry collection, JosE Antonio RodrIguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker's world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker's initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one's very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.
Reviews / Votes
"I've long admired JosE Antonio RodrIguez's writing, ever since Tia Chucha Press published his brilliant The Shallow End of Sleep. In this collection the intimate and hard truths of the borderlands surge with the singular revelatory rages of a queer brown man amidst the laments of a thousand forgotten souls. There is also love in the exquisite details, the surprising twists of language, the searing haunted lines." -Luis J. RodrIguez, founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate"There's great darkness and pain within these pages, but also wonder and comfort." - Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
"JosE Antonio RodrIguez has done it once again-given us a poetry collection that sings through pain and arrives at wisdom. The Day's Hard Edge takes us along borders, not only the Texas/Mexico borderlands of the poet's childhood, but to the borders between the living and the dead, between trauma and healing, and between magic and poetry. In poem after poem, you'll feel the urgency of witness and RodrIguez's expansion of verse, "one that transports you / To a corner of the soul you didn't know was there." -Denise Duhamel, author of Second Stories: Poems
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Evanston
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 223 mm
Width: 149 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
140 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8101-4725-6 (9780810147256)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jose Antonio Rodriguez is the author of the poetry collections This American Autopsy, Backlit Hour, and The Shallow End of Sleep and the memoir House Built on Ashes. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A Mexican immigrant and first-gen college graduate, he teaches writing at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.
Content
1
Not Even the Stars
The Gift
Bleat
The Ghosts in My Room
The Boys
Terrestrial
Pilgrim
Crushed
(number per day) x (number of school days per year) x (number of years) =
5,400 or A Low Estimate of the Number of Times I Was Name-Called Between
3rd and 8th Grades
Rock Hudson
One Day Walking Home from School
2
Tender
By the Vending Machine
Glimpse
The End of the World
Elegy to Elegy
There Was a Sentence
Boy in a Box
The Last Time I Went to Church
Immense
Nightfall
I Was Never Young (with You)
Face
Evidence
Wonder
Ode to the Sears Family Portrait
Flail
Mercy
3
On Standing Before the Repurposed Warehouse in My Hometown
Sometimes
Borderline
Signaling
Wooden Bollards
Neighbor
Focus
The Beginning
A City without Mirrors
Ode to the Gold Stars
In the Presence of Sunlight
Every Other Threshold
Entire
Shelter
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Not Even the Stars
The Gift
Bleat
The Ghosts in My Room
The Boys
Terrestrial
Pilgrim
Crushed
(number per day) x (number of school days per year) x (number of years) =
5,400 or A Low Estimate of the Number of Times I Was Name-Called Between
3rd and 8th Grades
Rock Hudson
One Day Walking Home from School
2
Tender
By the Vending Machine
Glimpse
The End of the World
Elegy to Elegy
There Was a Sentence
Boy in a Box
The Last Time I Went to Church
Immense
Nightfall
I Was Never Young (with You)
Face
Evidence
Wonder
Ode to the Sears Family Portrait
Flail
Mercy
3
On Standing Before the Repurposed Warehouse in My Hometown
Sometimes
Borderline
Signaling
Wooden Bollards
Neighbor
Focus
The Beginning
A City without Mirrors
Ode to the Gold Stars
In the Presence of Sunlight
Every Other Threshold
Entire
Shelter
Acknowledgments
About the Author