Catrachos
Poems
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- US$9.99
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- US$9.99
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The breathtaking debut collection from one of America’s most inventive new poets
A name for the people of Honduras, Catrachos is a term of solidarity and resilience. In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders—between life and death and between countries—invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity—an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this blistering debut, Guzman exorcises ghosts of past and present traumas some personal, many cultural with raw, unflinching commentary on queer identity and the immigrant experience. The book's title is a Spanish term for Hondurans, and Guzman writes with pride of his national identity while exploring how cultural biases have affected him as a gay man. A series of poems titled "Queerodactyl" feature a dinosaur greeting an oncoming asteroid with defiance, vowing to survive, "phoenixes on the dance floor thrusting in the face of loss." Elsewhere, Guzman reflects on growing up as a Honduran immigrant with limited means in America, shadowing his mother as she cleaned houses for a living, wondering about the point of it all: "Haven't we already gambled our future kingdom & lost?" The poet's imagery is consistently haunting, though its meaning is occasionally hindered by non-sequiturs and abstruse language ("twiggy panoplies... machomanic evacuation asteroid"). His elegy for those killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting, however, is stunning: "I am afraid of attending places that celebrate our bodies because that's also where our bodies have been cancelled." This is a courageous polemic against a growing moral bankruptcy in America, as well as a tender personal story delivered with effortless lyricism.
