Machete: Poems

Product Description 
This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts. "Morín's writing uses the mundane details of everyday life . . . as a jumping-off point for creating fascinating and philosophical worlds." —LitHub\n"Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle")--the epigraph of 
Machete--sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore.\nIn these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: "Whiteface" is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; "Duct Tape" lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself.\nOne part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morín considers our obsession with suffering--"the pain in which we trust"--and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have. 
 Review 
“Wonderfully intimate . . . Highlights Morín’s versatility as a poet who fuses both content and form . . . I would rush out to buy 
 a copy of 
Machete just to have a poem like ‘Two Dolphins’ on hand. Not only was I captivated by the sheer beauty and dexterity of the poem but I was struck by how rare it is to come across poems about fatherhood . . . If Morín wields language like a machete, it’s to slash through ignorance, to clear a path for strollering his children onto a sidewalk, safe from traffic.” 
—Julie Poole, Texas Observer\n“Perceptive . . . Asks readers to go beyond seeing the world at face value, offering vivid descriptions and cutting political critique . . . Playful and piercing, this impressive collection demonstrates a radical kind of empathy.” — 
Publishers Weekly 
 About the Author 
TOMÁS Q. MORÍN is the author of the memoir 
Let Me Count the Ways, forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, as well as the poetry collections 
Patient Zero and 
A Larger Country. He is coeditor, with Mari L'Esperance, of the anthology 
Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine and translator of 
The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. Morín lives with his family in Texas. 
 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 
I Sing the Body Aquatic\nWhen I offer my sweaty hand in greeting 
I can see the future. No matter how gently you squeeze, I know 
when our hands meet you will crowd my crooked index and pinkie fingers 
against their straight-as-an-arrow brothers 
so that my hand looks more like a fin 
than an appendage perfectly evolved 
for tying shoelaces or wiping a tear 
from the red face of the missionary 
who rode his bicycle under the sun 
all day to reach my porch. 
When he takes my hand he won’t find hope 
or brotherhood or whatever he’s looking for. Because I can see 
the future at times like this 
and because I have an unshakable faith in the law of averages, I know 
when our hands embrace he’ll find 
proof of natural selection 
 in the shape of my fingers, evolutionary 
holdovers from an era of gills 
when the earth was all aquarium 
and some distant relative with sleepy eyes 
and splayed fins who tired of being mocked by handsome carp said, To hell with it

Literature & Fiction

Morín, Tomás Q.

Genre Fiction

KNOPF

Selected from over 1000 manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Tomás Q. Morín's debut, A Larger Country, is rich with the mastery of Morín's lush storytelling. From war-torn images of Eastern Europe in the mid-1900s to modern-day glimpses of Morín's home state of Texas, these poems are a bold and brightly imagined. Enthusiastically introduced by Thomas Sleigh.

A Larger Country

United States

American Poetry Review

Growing up in a small town in South Texas in the eighties and nineties, poverty, machismo, and drug addiction were everywhere for Tomás Q. Morín. He was around four or five years old when he first remembers his father cooking heroin, and he recalls many times he and his mother accompanied his father while he was on the hunt for more, Morín in the back seat keeping an eye out for unmarked cop cars, just as his father taught him. It was on one of these drives that, for the first time, he blinked in a way that evolution hadn’t intended.\nLet Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín’s compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.

Let Me Count the Ways: A Memoir (American Lives)

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

University Of Nebraska Press

Where Are You From: Letters to My Son

Essays & Correspondence

"I will call the voice of this poet a 'common' voice... a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing." --Philip Levine, Ploughshares This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices--of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing. From "Patient Zero" Love is a worried, old heart disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff blues are made of, real blues that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk like the "Okra blues" or "Pay Day blues," though I think House would agree two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues, if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog bitten in two by the neighbor's dog, all of which makes me wonder about the source of our disease and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam and Eve left the garden...

Patient Zero

Poetry

Copper Canyon Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morín, Tomás Q.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Morín, Tomás Q.