Heredities

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 &quote;history gathers in the name we never are.&quote; The poems seek to speak beyond codified aesthetics and dictated identity politics in order to recognize a territory of &quote;irreducible otherness&quote; where the self's sinew may be &quote;reeved through revelation&quote; and where, finally, one finds &quote;obscurity bonded to light.&quote; This stunning collection heralds the arrival of an important new voice in American poetry.