Ruben Quesada’s Brutal Companion is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about the fact of longing: “You slowly fade/behind a sugar maple, branches like scarecrows waving goodbye.” And he manages this beauty with a poetry so pure I am always left gagging at even the slightest move and smallest decision in each line (for instance, “above the black milk of Lake Michigan”). These poems are a stunningly melancholic look at love and its eternality. —Jericho Brown
Brutal Companion, Ruben Quesada
$18.00
Available for pre-order. Official release: October 15th.
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MY MOTHER IS A GARDEN
She plants razzleberry fringe flowers in the backyard
as the chartreuse golden feather fare well next door.
Before my birth, she is acquired by the United States—
coerced by the American zodiac dream, she fled to Los Angeles—
decades later, she still withholds from speaking English and
only fertile names of flowers have taken root. She is luminous.
Her hair, a blackish grey against the philodendron, parted
long. I lose her in the shade of overgrown impatiens hanging
onto the hillside behind the house. The horizon undulates with
barberry and nettles, deer grass waves of silver. Years have passed,
not speaking with my mother, but today, I surprise her with a visit.
In the glow of the window, I watch her tend to her roses and
notice that I have taken the shape of her hips.
Description
RUBEN QUESADA is the editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Lambda Literary Review, Harvard Review and elsewhere. His collection of poetry, Brutal Companion, is the winner of the Barrow Street Editors Prize.
