Promises of Gold

Angebote / Angebote:

A groundbreaking collection of poems addressing how every kind of love-self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural-is birthed, shaped, and complicated by the invisible forces of gender, capitalism, religion, and so on. But even though the path to love is not easy, it is a path worth treading.Love-or its absence-is at the heart of everything we do, and yet it is often mishandled and misrepresented. In the words of José Olivarez: "How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love-but what about our friends? Those homies who show up when the romance ends to help you heal your heart. Those homies who are there all along-cheering for us and reminding us that love is abundant. I dreamed of writing a book of love poems for the homies."Promises of Gold is what happens when you try to write a book of love poems for the homies amid a global pandemic that has laid bare all the other pandemics that we've been living through our whole lives. Capitalism is a pandemic. The police state is a pandemic. Colonialism is a pandemic. Toxic masculinity is a pandemic. Love is complicated by forces larger than our hearts. I chose to bring the world and its chaos into these poems. Promises of Gold is written to replicate the struggle of loving and learning and growing. It is not linear."For those of us who are hyphenated Americans, where do we belong? Promises of Gold attempts to reckon with colonial legacy and the reality of what those promises have borne out for Mexican descendants. I wrote this book to imagine and document an ongoing practice of healing-healing that requires me to show up for myself, my community, my friends, my family, and my loves every day."The book is called Promises of Gold because a promise is an attempt. A promise made isn't always a promise kept. Promises of Gold also echoes the promises of the American Dream and, I hope, hints at some of the loss in the poems.