A Song of Dismantling

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

A Song of Dismantling is a marvelous debut. . . . Pérez knows that for us Latinx the personal has always been political. Indeed, the speaker's abuelita, both curandera and familial warrior, will tell us how 'she shared / her pillow with a rifle.' . . . These poems bring me hope that our ancestors remain with us as we struggle ever forward. I am grateful for this book.'--Jennifer Givhan, author of Landscape with Headless Mama

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

The fragile opulence of Fernando Pérez's first collection lyrically glides, processing absence . . . to transport the reader deep into the languageless horizons of exilic consciousness.'--J. Michael Martinez, author of Heredities: Poems