Stepmotherland
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Stepmotherland is a tour-de-force debut collection about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America.
Winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.
Holnes’s poems experiment with macaronic language, literary forms, and prosody. In their inventiveness, they create a new tradition that blurs the borders between poetry, visual art, and dramatic text. The new legacy he creates is one with significant reverence for the past, which informs a central desire of immigrants and native-born citizens alike: the desire for a better life. Stepmotherland documents an artist’s evolution into manhood and heralds the arrival of a stunning new poetic voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Holnes's ecstatic debut transforms an immigrant's dislocation into a newly discovered sense of belonging. Crossing borders and languages, these poems speak a truth about identity that's more complex than mere labels can capture. His joyful prosody comes through in such lines as, "our moreno swing-hips, dips, and spins to the two-beat/ carimbó drum rhythm stronger than the pulse/ thumping through my little boy body/ until I can't tell the difference/ between my corazón and the radio's ton-ton." The collection moves from the speaker's youth in Panama to a reimagined self and his relationship to America as he comes into adulthood. Poems question an authorized "African American" version of Blackness: "Now I like that boom boom pow, chickens jackin my style/ Now can I get a hey? Can I get a yo?/ You can get with this or—wait—is that how it goes?" Other poems celebrate the vulnerability of transformation: "A king,/ I queen so hard my earth-quaking rule/ breaks the laws of nature; flesh-colored spanx and/ control-top leggings tuck it away/ where the sun don't shine." This impressive work dazzles with songs for a shared humanity.
