Migrant Psalms gives us a rare look inside a Panamanian experience of migration, describing the harsh realities of mothers, children, and teens who entered the United States--or tried to do so. Holnes's poems find the universal through specificity; their exploration of expatriation, assimilation, and naturalization transcends the author's personal experience to speak to what it means to be "other" anywhere.
The collection begins with "Kyrie," a coming-to-America chronicle that spans three years in Texas, modeled after the liturgical Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy). Other poems experiment with macaronic language and form to parallel shifts in the speaker's status from immigrant to citizen, ending with "The 21st Century Poem," which probes what's "real" in today's New York City. Through the speaker's quest to become an American, this collection asks: Who are we becoming as individuals, as a society, as a nation, as a world? And is faith enough to enact change? Or is it just the first step?
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9780810143586
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publication Date: 04-15-2021
Pages: 48
Product Dimensions: 6.90h x 4.90w x 0.20d
Series: Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize
About the Author
DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poems have previously appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry magazine, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Holnes is a Cave Canem and CantoMundo fellow who has earned scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Postgraduate Writers Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and residencies nationwide, including a residency at MacDowell. His poem "Praise Song for My Mutilated World" won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. He is an assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches creative writing and playwriting, and a faculty member of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.