Keynote
An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry
Book Title
Lessons on Expulsion
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “Lush and formidable.”—The New York Times Book Review
Poem Excerpt
The vulgarity of the orchid in all of its hooded glory is showy but exquisite.
The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous.
I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat.
I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning.
Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work.
What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich.
But I just nursed on this leather whip.
I just splattered my sheets with my sadness.
—from “Poem of My Humiliations”
The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous.
I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat.
I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning.
Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work.
What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich.
But I just nursed on this leather whip.
I just splattered my sheets with my sadness.
—from “Poem of My Humiliations”
Body
“What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border—the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.
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About the Author
Credit: Robyn Lindemann
Praise
- “In lusty verse that startles and caresses, the author—whose parents traveled from Mexico to raise her in Illinois—vivifies the complexities of the immigrant experience.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
- “[A] fierce, assertive debut.”—The Washington Post
- “Lessons on Expulsion combines stories of immigration with those of sexual empowerment against a backdrop of surrealist and folkloric dreamscapes. . . . Dynamic poems.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- Finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award
Named a Best Book of 2017 by The Brooklyn Rail and Vol. 1 Brooklyn
