Heredities: Poems

In his award-winning first book, J. Michael Martinez reenvisions Latino poetics and its current conceptions of cultural identity. In Heredities, he opens a historically ravaged continental body through a metaphysical dissection into Being and silence. The hand manipulates a surgical etymology through the spine: the longitude where "e;history gathers in the name we never are."e; The poems seek to speak beyond codified aesthetics and dictated identity politics in order to recognize a territory of "e;irreducible otherness"e; where the self's sinew may be "e;reeved through revelation"e; and where, finally, one finds "e;obscurity bonded to light."e; This stunning collection heralds the arrival of an important new voice in American poetry.