A culturally rich poetic history of generations. [Fernando Pérez] applies the meaning of lenguaje and vivid imagery to his poems that retell his family's memories of their immigrant experience.--Superstition Review
Description
In this dynamic debut collection, Fernando Pérez employs lyric and nonce forms to interrogate identity politics and piece together a complex family history. The book embodies fragmentation in form and story, exploring how migration affects relationships between people of different generations. Pérez invites readers on the journey as his family story unfolds over time and distance.
Reviews
Fernando Pérez shows how we are sums of a past that both tethers and strangles us, that enriches as much as it drains. . . . Pérez's poems are ballads that resurrect the violent passions and hungers that we need to feel whole. A Song of Dismantling is as beautiful as it is gut-wrenching.--Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza: A Novel
Fernando Pérez shows how we are sums of a past that both tethers and strangles us, that enriches as much as it drains. . . . Pérez's poems are ballads that resurrect the violent passions and hungers that we need to feel whole. A Song of Dismantling is as beautiful as it is gut-wrenching.--Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza: A Novel
These poems move fluidly through transnational spaces; Pérez carefully breaks apart--syllable by syllable--the stories we've been told and sutures them back together again, different. Images turn and turn again with freshness.--Jane Wong, author of Overpour
