Unaccompanied
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Bestselling Author of Solito
"Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."—Jamaal May
"Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." —Glappitnova
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.
Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun."
From "Let Me Try Again":
He knew we weren't Mexican.
He must've remembered his family
coming over the border, or the border
coming over them, because he drove us
to the border and told us next time, rest
at least five days, don't trust anyone calling
themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines,
Alhambra. He knew we would try again.
And again—like everyone does.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zamora details his experience emigrating from El Salvador to the U.S. at age nine in his timely and excellent debut, a heartbreaking account of leaving behind the grandmother who raised him to join parents he barely remembered. He offers harrowing descriptions of crossing the border without documentation "not the promised land but barbwire and barbwire" and inhabits the perspectives of family members, imagining, for example, how his father must have felt to leave behind his son and wife to cross the border alone. He also reflects vividly on his grandfather, a former gangster known for chasing his loved ones with a machete, and recalls the Salvadoran Civil War of the 1980s in affecting detail: in "Rooftop," he remembers an aunt comforting him while bombs rained down nearby, and in "Aftermath" he writes, "See,/ little has changed. Burned thatch-roof, you can still stop rain." He diagnoses his homeland's ailments astutely ("Every day cops and gangsters pick at you/ with their metallic beaks, and presidents, guilty"), but the ache of homesickness remains: "lie to me. Say I can go back." Zamora's wistful ambivalence about his homeland and the difficulty of assimilating where one feels unwanted are both powerful and distressing.
