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