Hijito

Poetry. In HIJITO–selected by Eduardo C. Corral as winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize–Carlos Andres Gomez writes of brutality and beauty with the same urgency and with a truth that burns readily; it is a collection of survival instincts. As a vital and tender exploration and deconstruction of contemporary society, his poetry engages with America’s ever-changing landscape and the ways in which race, gender, and violence coalesce. Called powerful, truthful, and sublime by Cornel West, Gomez’s words are a necessary paean to hope and courage in the modern world. One loss makes you feel all the other losses, writes Carlos Andres Gomez in this searing and inquisitive collection. His attentiveness to language and to pain is unflinching. Craft and empathy are inseparable; lyrical pleasures resonate with tenderness and sorrow. The poems pull something usable from // the wreckage of performative masculinity, police brutality, and displacement. And what’s usable from misery? Gomez’s deft control of language–the syntax is nimble, the diction is zoetic–brings us close to the boundless resilience that helps us survive, change. –Eduardo C. Corral

Gomez makes an impressive debut in this collection, singing of family, bullets, survival and smoke. This hijito is a tiny growl / at first / that blossomed / into a wail. –Tyehimba Jess, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Striking, searching, and serious. Carlos Andres Gomez poems often leap landscapes beyond the West and ask us to consider the history we have been taught, how we speak it and carry it in our bodies. There is an earned depth and urgency to Gomez as a poet. –Raymond Antrobus, Rathbones Folio Prize winner