We're closing out 2024 with another stellar list of poetry books by Latinx Poets! If you missed the list from the first half of the year, you can read it here. We encourage you to support the work of these poets: buy their books, request them at your local library, or engage with their work via review or interview. We're fortunate to have Author Spotlight interviews and traditional interviews with many of these authors, so please check them out and learn more about these talented writers.
As always, I invite you to let me know if I don't already have your book on my radar for the 2025 lists. Please also get in touch if you'd like to do an Author Spotlight. Our email is letraslatinasblog2@gmail. com
July
Host Publications
In fragmented lyric and explosive song, mónica teresa ortiz’s poems explore catastrophe, illustrating in verse the refusal of the human spirit to submit to systems of oppression, and its undying cry for liberation. Because these are love poems, too. Singing for their beloveds, for hope, for deliverance. Singing for the afterlife, which ortiz envisions as a queer futurity in which “Nothing matters more than halting the brutal mechanizations of colonialism."
Haymarket Books
“A Map of My Want is an essential collection that burns with resilience, eroticism, and the pursuit of freedom on every page.”
—Ruben Quesada, author and editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry
Belle Point Press
Together Now hovers in the space between community and our own internal worlds. Alfonso Zapata navigates the complexities of cultural identity among a family who has formed his sense of belonging against illness, grief, and wider social pressures. Throughout this chapbook, poems about music, home, and myth-making give shape to the places that remain filled with memories even after we lose the people that first defined them.
Northwestern University Press / Curbstone Books
“I’ve long admired José Antonio Rodríguez's writing, ever since Tia Chucha Press published his brilliant The Shallow End of Sleep. In this collection the intimate and hard truths of the borderlands surge with the singular revelatory rages of a queer brown man amidst the laments of a thousand forgotten souls. There is also love in the exquisite details, the surprising twists of language, the searing haunted lines.”
—Luis J. Rodríguez, founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate
Riot of Roses Publishing House
Scribble Scrabbles is a poetic collage of a time and space in a Mexican neighborhood called Boyle Heights. It is an ode to the love, loss, joy, and pain of finding a voice during unheard times. These scribbles offer a glimpse of hope to all the roses that cracked cement and bloomed despite fighting for sunlight. A humble shout out to all the little brown girls that came before and a huge hug to all the little girls blooming after.
August
Coffee House Press
In this compelling and riveting collection, Daniel Borzutzky exposes the harsh realities of current economic crises, social unrest, repressive immigration policies, and systematized bureaucracy, not just in the United States but throughout the Americas.”
—Leonora Simonovis, Poetry Foundation
Alice James Books
"There are few writers as attuned to the potential of metaphor as Jennifer Espinoza, whose poems make this gesture something more like alchemy. From the first poem, where a trans woman stopped by the TSA blooms into a cloud of energy, Espinoza's poems enact a radical, surrealist, transmutation; her strange, dream-like recollections are spaces of un- and re-making, herself and the world. I Don't Want To Be Understood is simply a triumph—virtuosic, heartbreaking, and searing in its social critiques."
—torrin a. greathouse, author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound
Duke University Press
“Sandra Ruiz’s experiments with form dissolve the boundaries of genre and allow for the incandescence of rage in its theory body to be properly ignited. Left Turns in Brown Study is a manual for reinhabiting the ruthless beauty of our theory, a way into the generative pangs of radical possibility; how we harness the power of our mourning in a time of mass death, and call on the force of ritual as a way to return ourselves to one another and back again, in language and in citation.”
—Raquel Gutiérrez, author of Brown Neon
Penguin Books
“Virtuosic . . . one of our most talented and daring poets . . . Hivestruck crackles with Toro’s critical vision and dazzling wit.”
—John Keene, National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New and Selected Poems
September
Four Way Books
"Rara Avis’s keenest ace is its clear-eyed focus on family care and dissonance and on the eureka of generational love and forgiveness. Falconer, the pioneering queer father of adopted sons, resists showiness and controversy by employing telltale silence and the sturdiness of longstanding but still expressive modes and forms— couplets, cento, ekphrasis. In these supple, affecting poems, Falconer averts predictability and dwells (and even heals) instead in the kingdom of epiphanic memory, of nuance and caesura—poetry’s kingdom."
—Cyrus Cassells, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
University of Pittsburgh Press
"Nathan Xavier Osorio’s Querida leads the reader through a series of hymns, songs, and prayers that give voice to the question of how we are formed by what we are born into. The mark of inheritance is presented, repeated, worked through, and returned to—as it is slowly absorbed into the body of the text. Inheritance is the very matter from which this exquisite debut collection derives."
—Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion
Gameover Books
“It’s like coming out all over again, minus / the guarantees I am still loved.” A Wellness Check is a revelation delivered via bipolar poetics. Madness takes the form of reflections and pop culture subversions, movie scripts and footnotes, collages and collapses. The reader is lucky to be along for the ride of intentional typography and delicious language. I want to hand deliver this book to every bipolar I know so we can sing A Wellness Check during our lowest lows and highest highs.”
— SG Huerta, author of Last Stop and GOOD GRIEF
Dancing Girl Press
"Como la mariposa monarca whose migration takes “five generations of butterflies,” Acosta is both rooted in a place and culture, and “rhizomatic,” seeking to connect with all of her family histories. Though hidden, they have molded her in ways others cannot see (and often misunderstand), and they “help those of us four-five-six times removed” to regain their multilingual tongues, their forgotten literatures, their ancestral knowledge: “We break from the binary model / of the praised canon and forgotten others / proposing new frameworks / for all the constellations of literatures, peoples.” Such restructuring is essential, for her personally, and for our divided world. These poems are the link we need between past, present, and future, for “the adventure / continues across many lifetimes.”
—Elisa A. Garza, author of Regalos and Between the Light /entre la claridad
Garden Party Collective
“'What is more important: / Discovery or Death?' This question haunts the poems in Night Science. Kenny Bradley deftly considers scientific immor(t)ality, the unequal ethics of death, and what legacy means as both subject and scientist. Though the poems trouble the cost of discovering a cure or making an impact in the world of science, his poems continue to imagine better solutions where death is continually crossed off the list of necessary results in those pursuits. He sends wishes into the ether like, 'let my discoveries inspire unheard voices before my cells become controversy.' Restless in their reckoning, Bradley’s poems offer an original and necessary view into the scientific world."
—Laura Villareal, author of Girl's Guide to Leaving
TRP: The University Press of SHSU
“The Book of Wounded Sparrows is an exquisite cartography of countries both real and imagined that cannot be bridged by a solitary body. ‘Poetry remembers that distance can be made of suffering,’ Quintanilla writes, and so the narrator shatters himself into a hundred pieces—grieving boy, lost man, wounded sparrow and wild dog all at once—and tells us, ‘The sea forgives us / even if we don’t want to be / forgiven.’ Quintanilla understands that the work of the poet is to mourn, to remember, to pray, to dream, and beyond that, to collapse time and space and being, rendering ourselves whole, ‘I want to ask my wife to hold me, / hold me, I want to say, / until all my flesh burnsoff // and all that’s left is light.’”
—ire’ne lara silva,
author of the eater of flowers
Nightboat
"At the forefront of queer Latinx ecopoetics, Bendorf is a great composer-composter of poems whose work never surrenders to ecological crisis, insisting on queer and trans futures beyond empire. Poetry here is the language of our becoming free and our “becoming particulate,” guiding us “toward pleasure / from future / gravestones.”
—Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal
by Yaccaira Salvatierra BOA Editions
“Sons of Salt offers indelible proof that whatever breaks—even familial bonds, even the heart—can be pieced together again. Love is imperfect, fragile, but never ever lost. Yaccaira Salvatierra’s poems are inventive, dazzling, and achingly beautiful!”
— Rigoberto González, author of The Book of Ruin
October
Barrow Street
"This is a book that does not flinch, that is unafraid to witness a world where a gay boy is hunted in the schoolyard and where loved ones pass. Yet Quesada’s gaze is one that rises up to exalt love and queerness and celebrate the erotic and moments of living before loss. With “the elegance of hoary grass, / the magnolia’s grace,” with dazzling language and a tender heart, this is a book I did not want to stop reading, and when I did, made me look at the world with more intention and care. "
—Paul Hlava Ceballos, author of [banana], National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry finalist
Burrow Press
“Ariel Francisco’s most compelling poems push the boundaries of language, igniting wonder and introspection, a hallmark shared with the works of Marianne Moore and Larry Levis, who have a keen eye for the particular. Francisco reveals a world fractured by natural disasters and urban sprawl, where our alienation from nature and each other is painfully obvious. All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins establishes Francisco as a great maker of our time.”
–Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion, the 2023 Barrow Street Poetry Prize Editors’ Choice
Roof Books
"Windows 85 is a winningly brazen poetry collection of a new erotics, a book in which the second person often comes first. "You" is a slippery subject "woken by the breeze / of your lens": mirror-selves fleetingly glimpsed, or strangers misunderstood, yet longed-for. Campanioni's headlong, minimally punctuated writing rings a round of thorny rosies, with pocketfuls, to spare, of kinky poesies amidst the before- and afterglow of queer collisions and near-misses: "so I relaxed into you / so you fucked around & found out // ensconced in my absence [...]." To be sure, Windows 85 rewards the reader with refreshing games of lyrical leapfrog. Take your place in these lines, and get ready to spring high."
—Chris Hosea, author of Double Zero
Alegría Publishing
In The Universe Will Give You Flores, Darlene Moreno delves into themes of loss, heartbreak, and identity within a rich tapestry of familial, cultural, and sociopolitical landscapes. Confronting personal challenges such as the loss of her mother and her own cancer diagnosis, as well as feelings of disconnection, Moreno's introspective journey examines her sense of belonging both to herself and within various communities. Through her encounters with diverse peoples and places, she uncovers the enduring love, care, and wisdom that the universe offers, ultimately leading her to discover her own self-love.
November
Abode Press
"Stephen Rendon’s Moth and Ghost at Work intricately weaves meditation, memory, and diagrams to explore labor as both 'a feature and a bug' for working-class Mexican Americans in Seguin, TX. Rendon’s poetry is testimony and elegy, reminding us of Texas's violent past and the consequences that still haunt us. Moth and Ghost at Work is a must-read collection, an emerging voice that illustrates the Central Texas experience."
—Cloud Delfina Cardona, author of What Remains
Riot of Roses
Pimping My Trauma is a courageous poetry collection that serves as a defiance of the stigma of having sexual trauma. This book challenges the social norm of a blue-collar environment where sexual survivors silence themselves in fear of being seen as defects in a non-benevolent society. As a survivor, the poet speaks through this collection about the need for intimacy and control, while wrestling with identity and self-deprivation. This collection of poems results in living life afloat with a desperate need to be grounded and reclaim power.
Noemi Press
In the reverberations of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shut down, Juan Felipe Herrera began a daily practice to draw and write mandala poems. Through this new practice, Herrera created well over 500 mandalas, a series of circles that served as contemplations, concentrations, and transformations of his consciousness within the isolation. Herrera documents the loss, suffering, and challenges of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, an election cycle, as well as the onset of new wars and conflicts in Ukraine and into the present. Through verse and visual art Herrera moves away from a journal of the day to day, and instead, through a commitment to continue to excavate the days, arrives at the center of the mandala wheel to discover kindness, compassion, and healing. The Cosmic Flow blends the dexterity of Herrera’s poetic, artistic, and spiritual practices developed over the last 50 years and provides the reader with a path forward amidst the heaviness of the world.
December
Noemi Press
BLACK LAVENDER MILK is an experimental lyric that dreamt of becoming a novel only to wake up as notebook. In its 10th Anniversary Edition, BLACK LAVENDER MILK features a new foreword and archival material from the time of writing. Employing and smudging elements of poetry, prose and memoir, BLACK LAVENDER MILK offers the space of a ‘novel’ as a site of mourning, inquiry and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on Writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry and Dreaming.
FlowerSong Press
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez is one of my favorite contemporary poets. Her work tenderly explores the deep geographies of family, friendships, the environment, and human-animal relations. Throughout, she maps the thresholds of loss and love through carefully crafted narratives and haunting images. Every page feels like an ocean of emotions breaking open; at the same time, every page is “one wing opening.”
—Craig Santos Perez, 2023 National Book Award Winner for Poetry and author of From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
Omnidawn
"In b o y, Wise creates poetic forms strong enough to hold the staggering weight of grief and supple enough to be remade by its force. Resisting the desire to make loss 'smaller, less opaque,' these poems are stricken with its large and layered presence. Never has a book of poems felt so much a collaboration with silence. These sequences are less scripts or performances than they are a kind of music heard within and against absence. Wise's writing is gorgeous, transfixing. As only the best poets can, she hears 'not hereness.' 'We just want the feeling of coming up from that dark water—I do— / I want that feeling,' she says. Even if these poems can’t provide that particular solace, they make a language that takes us to something close to it."
—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the National
Book Award for Poetry
FlowerSong Press
Jessica Helen López's poems are at once explosive and intimate, cries for justice and windows on a woman's life. They are powerful and true.
— Margaret Randall, author of Last Words: Essays