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A lyrical debut exploring the emotional fallout of immigration, childbirth, queer desire within a heteronormative marriage, and, ultimately, belonging.
About the author
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of five through the mountains of Tijuana. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and earned degrees from Sacramento State University and The University of Michigan, where he was the first undocumented student to graduate from the MFA program in Creative Writing. He has received fellowships to attend the Vermont Studio Center, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. He cofounded the Undocupoets campaign, which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first poetry book prizes in the country, and he was recognized with the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. His work has been adapted to opera through collaboration with the composer Reinaldo Moya. With the late C.D. Wright, he co-translated the poems of the contemporary Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in PBS NewsHour, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, Fusion TV, and BuzzFeed, among others. He lives in California where he teaches at Sacramento State University.
Summary
A lyrical debut exploring the emotional fallout of immigration, childbirth, queer desire within a heteronormative marriage, and, ultimately, belonging.
Foreword
Galleys available: national mailing to key review/media outlets 4-5 months prior to publication.National advertising: Poets & Writers, American Poets, the Academy of American Poets newsletter, Rain Taxi, and Redactions.National print campaign: 100+ finished books will be mailed to key review outlets, specifically targeting Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The LA Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, The Rumpus, Huffington Post Poetry, BookForum, LA Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, NPR, etc.Outreach to blogs and online outlets for category features, including BuzzFeed, Bustle, Book Riot, etc. for such themes as immigration, migrant worker rights, bisexuality, etc.Buy-ins to relevant academic conferences, trade shows, and publications: American Library Association Annual Meeting, CBSD Sales and Academic catalogs, etc.Spring announcements will be submitted to Publishers Weekly.Online/social media campaign: Extensive promotion through BOA's website and blog; Facebook (6,500+ contacts), Twitter (6,100 followers), Instagram (1,500+ followers), and Pinterest (550+ followers) accounts; print and e-postcards; print and e-materials; and print and e-catalogs.Electronic book announcement postcards will be sent to Marcelo’s extensive list of academic contacts, reviewer contacts, bookstore contacts, and literary bloggers.Electronic newsletter feature will be emailed to BOA's database of 6,500+ contacts.Ebook will be available at the same time as print publication to maximize sales. Ebook ISBN will be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed. Publisher and author will be promoting both electronic and print editions via social media.Marcelo will attend the AWP Conference 2018 in Tampa, FL, where he will have an author signing.Marcelo has strong personal and professional contacts throughout California, the Great Lakes Region (centered in Ann Arbor, MI), and New York. He will give readings at California State University–Sacramento, the Sacramento Poetry Center, and has given readings at the University of San Francisco and the Crossroads Reading Series in Oakland. The University of Michigan’s MFA program has invited him to speak in 2018, as has the University of Notre Dame, and Marcelo also plans to promote Cenzontle at the launch party for his chapbook at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, IL in January 2018. The author is also well connected to the employees at the Literati Book Store in Ann Arbor.Plans for a multi-city book tour, including such places as Austin, San Antonio, Houston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.Possible joint readings and events with Javier Zamora (Copper Canyon Press), Nate Marshall (Pitt Poetry Series), Eduardo C. Corral (Yale), Erika L. Sanchez (Graywolf), Natalie Scenters Zapico (Copper Canyon Press), Derrick Austin (BOA Editions), Analicia Sotelo (Milkweed), Janine Joseph (Alice James), Nicole Sealey (Ecco), David Thomas Martinez (Sarabande Books), sam sax (Penguin), Kaveh Akbar (Alice James), Jenn Given (University of Arkansas Press), Danez Smith (Graywolf), Christopher Soto (Sibling Rivalry Press), and others.Blurbs and endorsements from Brenda Shaughnessy, D. A. Powell, and other acclaimed poets.Promotion through the author's social media platforms and website.
Additional text
"In the collection, which takes its title from the Spanish word for birdsong, to sing of one’s undocumented life is to risk being consumed by it: 'The song becoming / the bird becoming / the song,' the poet writes. 'The bird unraveled its song and became undone.' And yet, in the collection’s first poem, the desire to tell the story is also inescapable." —The Paris Review
"Castillo resists resignation to silence; his poems embody a belief in art’s transformative ability. Lush musicality renders agricultural labor, corporeal punishment, and romantic difficulties beautiful. Forged in Keatsian negative capability, Castillo’s poetics often involve finding the description that will lift the painful or unjust into music." —Publishers Weekly -Tara Wanda Merrigan
“I know this book changed me. The book itself knows change, how to change itself, knows so well how transformation—vast essential change which would seem to oppose a self—brings a person ever closer to their truth.” —Brenda Shaughnessy
"In the spirit of Whitman, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo slips in silently to lie down between the bridegroom and the bride, to inhabit many bodies and many souls, between rapture and grief. 'I want everything to touch me.' These are poems that open borders both personal and political, a map of silences and celebrations. 'You called it cutting apart/ I called it song.'" —D. A. Powell
"Federico Garcia Lorca described duende as a struggle, not a thought, and the deep and natural lyricism of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Cenzontle is a paragon of that struggle, where ‘it’s easy to make honey/from what is beautiful and what is not.’ In this exquisite debut collection, longing twins with inheritance to consider the interiority of nationhood and the legacy of masculinity and exile. Castillo’s finely-honed poems celebrate and reveal the contours of physical and historical intimacies, a feast for the eyes and heart." —Carmen Giménez Smith
