Foundation poems by Gustavo Barahona-López
Winner of the inaugural Chicanx Visions Book Series Project Prize
Foundation poems by Gustavo Barahona-López
About the Chicanx Visions Book Series:
This project is possible through the Gente Chicana/SOYmos Chicanos Fund. Grants from this fund will support the understanding, appreciation, and practice of Chicano art.
FlowerSong Press believes that it is important to promote Chicanx poetry and writing. Chicanx poetry has always been about both celebration and protest: celebrating Chicanx culture and people, and continuing to fight injustice. Even though it’s been almost 60 years since Yo Soy Joaquin entered the world, the same issues that Epic addresses are still present in the world. It is necessary for Chicanx art to be produced because it is necessary that Chicanx speak about/to the world and their place in it.
Winner of the inaugural Chicanx Visions Book Series Project Prize
Foundation poems by Gustavo Barahona-López
About the Chicanx Visions Book Series:
This project is possible through the Gente Chicana/SOYmos Chicanos Fund. Grants from this fund will support the understanding, appreciation, and practice of Chicano art.
FlowerSong Press believes that it is important to promote Chicanx poetry and writing. Chicanx poetry has always been about both celebration and protest: celebrating Chicanx culture and people, and continuing to fight injustice. Even though it’s been almost 60 years since Yo Soy Joaquin entered the world, the same issues that Epic addresses are still present in the world. It is necessary for Chicanx art to be produced because it is necessary that Chicanx speak about/to the world and their place in it.
Winner of the inaugural Chicanx Visions Book Series Project Prize
Foundation poems by Gustavo Barahona-López
About the Chicanx Visions Book Series:
This project is possible through the Gente Chicana/SOYmos Chicanos Fund. Grants from this fund will support the understanding, appreciation, and practice of Chicano art.
FlowerSong Press believes that it is important to promote Chicanx poetry and writing. Chicanx poetry has always been about both celebration and protest: celebrating Chicanx culture and people, and continuing to fight injustice. Even though it’s been almost 60 years since Yo Soy Joaquin entered the world, the same issues that Epic addresses are still present in the world. It is necessary for Chicanx art to be produced because it is necessary that Chicanx speak about/to the world and their place in it.
Praise for FOUNDATION
“Father told me I should never cry. / What a thing to demand of a waterfall.” A tender, expansive meditation on masculinity and grief, absence and belonging, Gustavo Barahona-Lopez’ Foundation is a work rooted in the heart of the bordered body. Speaking as both child and father, memory and witness, the future and the past, Barahona-Lopez’s poems strike a chord between searing critique and bright compassion, engaged in the reparative act of radical imagining.
—Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian
Gustavo Barahona-Lopez gives texture and substance to our dreams, our heartbreaks, our anger, and our wonder. Through cobblestones, smokestacks, cartilage, lakes, and tears, Barahona-Lopez gives language to our unspeakable truths. How do we reckon with the fathers that love us in beautiful and sometimes hurtful ways? What do we do when our histories and lineages are interrupted or otherwise hidden by migration? Foundation is a book I will cherish for a long time.
—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold
In these marvelous and moving poems, the speaker molds his own blood, builds upon a ‘corroded base.’ An elegiac but defiant tone ripples through the book: tenderness pivots to anger, bewilderedness dovetails into wonder. Gustavo Barahona-Lopez’s language—resonant, lyrical— constructs a space where his speaker can tend to his wounds, inhabit a present rich with possibilities.
—Eduardo Corral, author of Slow Lightning
“They call us locusts forgetting how we have fed them” -- Daaaamn. This line has stayed with me from the first ‘speed-read’ through the close read. I love how it works in multiple contexts: as fieldworkers feeding the ppl, or as perhaps a subtle, guess what fools, we’ve been feeding the locusts and they might be coming for YOU now.
—Anthody Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha