speaking with grackles by soapberry trees by César L. de León, Winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters
speaking with grackles by soapberry trees by César L. de León, Winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters
& Philosophical Society of Texas 2022 Poetry Winner
César L. de León’s debut book, speaking with grackles by soapberry trees, is a collection of poems that make their home in the Borderlands of Texas. There are poems rooted in childhood and young-adult memories like “El Mundo” and “Learning to Swim,” and works like “The Migration of the Mariposa” twin poems and others that deal with queerness, identity, and relationships —familial and romantic. The inevitable grappling and coping that comes from living in a contested space, like the border, at a time when gun violence, police brutality, immigrant incarceration, and racism have increasingly become part of everyday life around the country can be found in poems like “River Escucha,” “Sugar Skull,” and others. Throughout the collection, the spirit of the borderlands marks its presence in a form of spirituality connecting the speaker with the natural world around him; birds aren’t the only things that he communes with. Lastly, like the ever-mutable nature of the land, more than a few of the poems in this collection range in form with creative and intentional use of white space or by fashioning pieces like “American Mathematics” and “Cloud Watching” in forms atypical for poetry.
Born in Monterrey, Mexico, César L. de León now lives and works in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas where he is an active participant in the local literary scene. He holds an MFA in creative writing and a graduate certificate in Mexican American Studies from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is one of four poet-organizers for Poets Against Walls which allows him to further engage with the community through workshops, public readings, and other events centered on social justice and border issues. His work has been published in Queen Mob’s Tea House, Pilgrimage, The Acentos Review, Yellow Chair Review, La Bloga, and the anthologies Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando, Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, The Border Crossed Us: An Anthology to End Apartheid, Texas Weather Anthology, and Boundless: The Official Anthology of the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival among others. He has received awards from the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association and the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.
Advance Praise for speaking with grackles by soapberry trees
César L. de León’s poems are elemental gifts that ground us at once in the beauty of the Rio Grande Valley land and its seemingly steady assurances while also taking flight like kites and kestrels. As the collection progresses, silences mount and unravel in conditions created by toxic masculinities, inequities, and US American empire: “everywhere / the swallowing of huizache / thorns / labeled apple pie.” De León’s poems speak from those silences in powerful poems that celebrate lucecitas and rascuachismo and mourn the lives lost to militarized borderlands, mass shootings, police brutality, and COVID. An admirable debut collection by an outstanding poet.
—Emmy Pérez, Texas Poet Laureate 2020, author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face
César De León’s first collection glows with the immediacy of a cultural pastoral—lush in its ambitions and profuse in its design as it wrestles with South Texas. It both embraces and rejects Mexican-American identity—happily housed there and eager to leave. I marveled at the nimble imagery that challenges machismo, racism, tradition, and violence in these pages: “Every man for his own / myth and monolith anchored /around their collar”. I marveled at the way De León finds poetry in the pork belly of boiled beans and the mariposas of the delta, wearing nature as a fine gown: “the summer of cat’s claw and yucca thickets / diagraming names / of future lovers / threaded / through chain-link fences / each a constellation of open windows”. I marveled at how a lover is described with “the cinnamon birthmark that migrated / north / con las mariposas” and a ghost flower reflects on how “something surviving / in this body yearns for river”. The last poem in the collection asks, “don't you recognize me, america?” and the answer is clearly no, because a new original voice has arrived, one that demands attention. An impressive debut.
—Rodney Gomez, Poet Laureate of McAllen, Texas and author of Arsenal with Praise Song
“Firm and defiant in its claim to the literal and figurative Borderlands, this sumptuous poetry collection welcomes the reader into a world rich with the ways we create meaning from the muddy banks of our lives. A fierce debut. How fortunate we are to experience this new voice in poetry.”
—José Antonio Rodríguez, author of This American Autopsy
speaking with grackles by soapberry trees is a masterpiece. César Leornardo de Leon's poetry here is a whole universe lit up by el sol and la luna at the same time. de Leon cuts straight to the bone with such precision, imagery and lyricism one can not bear to put the book down. César takes you to the edge of the river, knotting you up in the throat and the heart and leaves you in new lands you never dreamed of. These poems are lyrical, they are decadent, they are bittersweet, they are real life. de Leon provides you a new landscape honoring all things queer, bordered, forgotten, and desired. César warns and wishes in these poems, he invites you to a remarkable space, where "here a hummingbird can dream of being king." We dream with him every time we read this work.
—Lupe Mendez, 2022 Texas Poet Laureate, author of Why I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books, 2019)