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Year of the Dog - Diverse Reads

Year of the Dog

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A Blessing the Boats Selection

A New York Times Books New & Notable Poetry Book

One of Big Other's "Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020"

On The Rumpus's list of "What To Read When 2020 Is Just Around the Corner"


In the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War.


The title refers to the year 1970—the “year of the Metal Dog” in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold stories from a war that changed her family and the nation.


In poems and lamentations that evoke Hecuba, the mythic figure so consumed by grief over the atrocities of war that she was transformed into a howling dog, and La Llorona, the weeping woman in Mexican folklore who haunts the riverbanks in mourning and threatens to disturb the complicity of those living in the present, Paredez recontextualizes the historical moments of the Vietnam era, from the arrest of Angela Davis to the haunting image of Mary Ann Vecchio at the Kent State Massacre, never forgetting the outcry and outrage that women’s voices have carried across time.

ISBN-13: 9781950774012

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.

Publication Date: 04-14-2020

Pages: 128

Product Dimensions: 6.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

Series: American Poets Continuum #178

Deborah Paredez is a poet, performance scholar, and cultural critic. Her poetry and prose explore the workings of memory, the legacies of war, and feminist elegy. She is author of the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and of the poetry collection This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002). She also serves as Series Co-Editor of the CantoMundo Poetry Book Prize awarded annually to a collection by a Latinx poet. Her poetry and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Poetry, Poet Lore, and the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (Norton 2018). Paredez received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Performance at Northwestern University and her BA in English at Trinity University. Her work has been shaped by her encounters with women of color, feminism, formalist poetry, diva performances, and by her experiences as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran immigrant father and a mother whose nursing skills could patch up many wounds. Born and raised in San Antonio, she has lived on both coasts, endured a handful of Chicago winters, and taught American poetry in Paris. She currently lives with her husband, historian Frank Guridy, and their daughter in New York City where she is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and Co-Founder and Co-Director of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latina/o poets.

Read an Excerpt

Wife's Disaster Manual



When the forsaken city starts to burn,

after the men and children have fled,

stand still, silent as prey, and slowly turn


back. Behold the curse. Stay and mourn

the collapsing doorways, the unbroken bread

in the forsaken city starting to burn.


Don’t flinch. Don’t join in.

Resist the righteous scurry and instead

stand still, silent as prey. Slowly turn


your thoughts away from escape: the iron

gates unlatched, the responsibilities shed.

When the forsaken city starts to burn,


surrender to your calling, show concern

for those who remain. Come to a dead

standstill. Silent as prey, slowly turn


into something essential. Learn

the names of the fallen. Refuse to run ahead

when the forsaken city starts to burn.

Stand still and silent. Pray. Return.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Paredez has a gift for storytelling through form. This is an astonishing book.”
—Publishers Weekly ⭑ Starred Review

“Candid and chilling, Deborah Paredez’s second collection of poems relates her stories and memories of being a Latinx daughter during the Việt Nam conflict.”
—Ms. Magazine

“Deborah Paredez’s book The Year of the Dog presents a palimpsest of grief howling at the exposed face of Empire. Mixing myth, memory, image, and textual documentary, her verse invents, fragments, constructs, and disfigures. Collectively the poems speak with chilling and touching clarity as they address systemic brutality and militarized power in service to state, nation, and whiteness. This book is fierce, moving, and necessary.”
—Hoa Nguyen, author of Violet Energy Ingots

“Deborah Paredez’s Year of the Dog refuses to lay static on white space. Time is a character in this engaging collection, beginning in the tumultuous late ‘60s and reaching into now, today. Each poem becomes lyrical evidence laid before us—personal—and reckoned with. One feels the timeline has been lived. Yet, borders are crossed, fences jumped, and experimental detours—even graphic renderings—hold it all together. The echo of war and protest lingers. Paredez’s Year of the Dog is a song for now, as one confronts recent history through needful reflection.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems

“Deborah Paredez’s new collection, Year of the Dog, is a hauntingly beautiful collage, poems that move seamlessly between the close-up, intimate detail to a bird’s-eye view of history—like looking at one small segment of a large canvas then stepping back to take in the whole arresting sweep of it. Here, what it means to contend with grief, to live in the aftermath of national and personal trauma—the casualties and collateral damage of war and injustice—is in the hands of an unflinching witness. This is the inheritance of a poet born in the year of the dog: bound to the duty of remembering and to singing the names of the dead and the living in a voice turned again and again ‘into something essential.’”
—Natasha Trethewey, author of Monument: Poems: New and Selected

“In this striking and powerful collection, Deborah Paredez explores the personal and mythical dimensions of war. Weaving images with autobiography, history with poetry, and self with family, Year of the Dog is an essential work for understanding how war is connected to every facet of our lives.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer