Description
Migrant Psalms prays for a way to make sense of immigration to the United States-now that we realize the American Dream was always an impossible one. Both reverent and daring, this verse interrogates religion, race, class, family, and sexuality. Written as a call to action, the collection pulls together prayer, popular culture, and technology to tell a twenty-first-century migrant story.
Migrant Psalms gives us a rare look inside a Panamanian experience of migration, describing the harsh realities of mothers, children, and teens who entered the United States-or tried to do so. Holnes's poems find the universal through specificity; their exploration of expatriation, assimilation, and naturalization transcends the author's personal experience to speak to what it means to be "other" anywhere.
The collection begins with "Kyrie," a coming-to-America chronicle that spans three years in Texas, modeled after the liturgical Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy). Other poems experiment with macaronic language and form to parallel shifts in the speaker's status from immigrant to citizen, ending with "The 21st Century Poem," which probes what's "real" in today's New York City. Through the speaker's quest to become an American, this collection asks: Who are we becoming as individuals, as a society, as a nation, as a world? And is faith enough to enact change? Or is it just the first step?
About the Author
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poems have previously appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry magazine, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Holnes is a Cave Canem and CantoMundo fellow who has earned scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Postgraduate Writers Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and residencies nationwide, including a residency at MacDowell. His poem "Praise Song for My Mutilated World" won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. He is an assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches creative writing and playwriting, and a faculty member of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Reviews
['OTM'] transcends the list poem so far as to create its own unique form. This is the form of all of Darrel Alejandro Holnes's work. The conclusion
of his poem 'Poder' describes and defines this original form: 'moving us farther and farther / away from the world being just rhetoric, / into the structure of its design . . . / knowing this too is poetry.' Reader, this is poetry." -Ed Roberson, from the introduction "Darrel Holnes captures beautifully the deep investment in hope (and in the divine) that immigrants must make, and the deeper investment in themselves that fuels their hope. And with vibrant images, compelling narratives, and witty and affective turns of phrase, he sings the ambivalence of arrival and the shifting blues of self-making. Migrant Psalms is a wise and soulful debut, a gem of a book." -Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas: Poems
Book Information
ISBN 9780810143586
Author Darrel Alejandro Holnes
Format Paperback
Page Count 48
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Migrant Psalms gives us a rare look inside a Panamanian experience of migration, describing the harsh realities of mothers, children, and teens who entered the United States-or tried to do so. Holnes's poems find the universal through specificity; their exploration of expatriation, assimilation, and naturalization transcends the author's personal experience to speak to what it means to be "other" anywhere.
The collection begins with "Kyrie," a coming-to-America chronicle that spans three years in Texas, modeled after the liturgical Christian prayer Kyrie Eleison (Lord, have mercy). Other poems experiment with macaronic language and form to parallel shifts in the speaker's status from immigrant to citizen, ending with "The 21st Century Poem," which probes what's "real" in today's New York City. Through the speaker's quest to become an American, this collection asks: Who are we becoming as individuals, as a society, as a nation, as a world? And is faith enough to enact change? Or is it just the first step?
About the Author
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poems have previously appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry magazine, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Holnes is a Cave Canem and CantoMundo fellow who has earned scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Postgraduate Writers Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and residencies nationwide, including a residency at MacDowell. His poem "Praise Song for My Mutilated World" won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. He is an assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches creative writing and playwriting, and a faculty member of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Reviews
['OTM'] transcends the list poem so far as to create its own unique form. This is the form of all of Darrel Alejandro Holnes's work. The conclusion
of his poem 'Poder' describes and defines this original form: 'moving us farther and farther / away from the world being just rhetoric, / into the structure of its design . . . / knowing this too is poetry.' Reader, this is poetry." -Ed Roberson, from the introduction "Darrel Holnes captures beautifully the deep investment in hope (and in the divine) that immigrants must make, and the deeper investment in themselves that fuels their hope. And with vibrant images, compelling narratives, and witty and affective turns of phrase, he sings the ambivalence of arrival and the shifting blues of self-making. Migrant Psalms is a wise and soulful debut, a gem of a book." -Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas: Poems
Book Information
ISBN 9780810143586
Author Darrel Alejandro Holnes
Format Paperback
Page Count 48
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
