Catrachos: Poems

by Roy G. Guzmán

Overview

The breathtaking debut collection from one of America’s most inventive new poets

A name for the people of Honduras, Catrachos is a term of solidarity and resilience. In these unflinching, riveting poems, Roy G. Guzmán reaches across borders—between life and death and between countries—invoking the voices of the lost. Part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story, Catrachos finds its own religion in fantastic figures such as the X-Men, pop singers, and the “Queerodactyl,” which is imagined in a series of poems as a dinosaur sashaying in the shadow of an oncoming comet, insistent on surviving extinction. With exceptional energy, humor, and inventiveness, Guzmán’s debut is a devastating display of lyrical and moral complexity—an introduction to an immediately captivating, urgently needed voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450239
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,046,579
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Roy G. Guzmán received a 2019 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Raised in Miami, Guzmán lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Catrachos 1

*

Queerodactyl 5

Día de los Muertos 6

Queerodactyl 8

Atonement in the Key of Padre 10

Our Lady of Suyapa 11

My Great-Grandmother's Egg Thief 13

Queerodactyl 15

Preparations for a Trip Home 16

Midwestern Skulls for the Broken Latino 19

**

The American Dream 23

Allapattah Branch Library 25

Queerodactyl 27

Arthur's Spelling Trubble 29

Queerodactyl 31

Marrow 32

Queerodactyl 33

Amor Eterno 34

In Service of Silence 37

Marrow 45

When a Person Says Go Back to Your Country 46

***

Restored Mural for Orlando 49

Queerodactyl 52

Quinceañera 53

Queerodactyl 54

After the Tempest 55

Finding Logic in a Crushed Head 56

Jurisdiction 58

Those Seventy-Two Bodies Belong to Us 59

Queerodactyl 61

****

Self-Portrait According to George W. Bush 65

*****

Marero 79

Queerodactyl 81

Marrow 82

Queerodactyl 84

Queerodactyl 85

Payday Loan Phenomenology 86

Queerodactyl 91

Note on the Title 93

Notes 95

Acknowledgments 99

Editorial Reviews

02/17/2020

In this blistering debut, Guzman exorcises ghosts of past and present traumas—some personal, many cultural—with raw, unflinching commentary on queer identity and the immigrant experience. The book’s title is a Spanish term for Hondurans, and Guzman writes with pride of his national identity while exploring how cultural biases have affected him as a gay man. A series of poems titled “Queerodactyl” feature a dinosaur greeting an oncoming asteroid with defiance, vowing to survive, “phoenixes on the dance floor—thrusting in the face of loss.” Elsewhere, Guzman reflects on growing up as a Honduran immigrant with limited means in America, shadowing his mother as she cleaned houses for a living, wondering about the point of it all: “Haven’t we already gambled our future kingdom—& lost?” The poet’s imagery is consistently haunting, though its meaning is occasionally hindered by non-sequiturs and abstruse language (“twiggy panoplies... machomanic evacuation asteroid”). His elegy for those killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting, however, is stunning: “I am afraid of attending places that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies have been cancelled.” This is a courageous polemic against a growing moral bankruptcy in America, as well as a tender personal story delivered with effortless lyricism. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Who more than queer people—especially queer people of color—know what it’s like to dance in the face of danger, to sashay away in the face of extinction, to love in the face of stolen liberties? . . . The emergence of a powerful new force."—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Catrachos heralds the arrival of a distinctive poetic voice; visually compelling, filled with . . . wide-ranging, and contrasting images, inventive in its language and forms, and brave for its candor and introspection."—The Rumpus

“Nothing in Catrachos is meant to be taken for granted. Poems speak candidly to each other, the subjects explored add to larger conversations about societal issues, and the language always reflects both the bravery and vulnerability of the human condition.”—Heavy Feather Review

“The stunning experimentation and vivid details [in Catrachos] communicate an aching and sense of melancholy that will enthrall readers. . . . A creative and often harrowing look at society's mistreatment of queer Latinx bodies, and their stunning resilience.”—The Latino Book Review

“Poems of resilience, invention, and queerness call on pop culture, immigrant stories, and an imagined dinosaur called the ‘Queerodactyl’ for a work of humor and heart.”—Minnesota Monthly

“The idea that home is both in the here and abroad is present throughout Catrachos. . . . There are incredibly potent moments where Guzmán takes these estrangements—made legible by the fact of queer desire—and writes them into sanctuary.”—The Latinx Project

“Marked by poems that are lyrical and syntactically daring. . . . [Catratchos] nods to the perseverance of excavating a queer self and giving it flight.”—Library Journal

“The powerful dramatic build of Roy G. Guzmán’s poems bears up an opera in forte. . . . One grown in fierce female love and engaged in an America where queerness, though still under threat and often silenced, will not stay silent unless silence speaks. In Catrachos, silence, even absence, grows loud enough to fill pages.”—Heid E. Erdrich

“As the son of immigrants, as a queer man, as a poet, I’ve been waiting for a book like Catrachos. Endlessly inventive and sonically brilliant, the poems refuse borders. . . . Roy G. Guzmán’s debut is phenomenal, necessary. It has changed and recharged me.”—Eduardo C. Corral

“Catrachos is a fervent, jaw-dropping debut, the kind of blistering chronicle that absolutely could not exist before this. . . . You have read stories of leaving one land for another. You have heard stories about the difficulties of coming out to a staid family and church. But those fractured songs have never been sung this fiercely. Or this well.”—Patricia Smith

From the Publisher

08/01/2020

In his debut collection, NEA fellow Guzmán braids together his immigrant family's life and his own queer coming of age, with side trips to a series of "Queerodactyl" poems featuring an outspoken dinosaur ("I ain't/ roaring like a DinoKatyPerry. Bring it! I said:// Bring it!!! Now sashay"). America isn't easy—one poem is titled "When a Person Says Go Back To Your Country"—but there's grit. Highlighting cultural disjunction, Guzmán notes that a professor "appalled when I said/ Nora still had a future to look forward to even in the 19th/ century… never met the Latinas in my family." Indeed, the term catrachos denotes Hondurans and connotes toughness (it was coined when Hondurans joined with Salvadorans to defeat 19th-century American freebooters), which explains Guzmán's wily dinosaur: "After they locate & excavate your wing fossils,/ perseverance might be the trait you're known for." Guzmán is tough, too, when negotiating queerness, recalling fearing his father ("I lie to him so I can live") and the Pulse nightclub shooting ("a gun is a heart that has forgotten// to sing"). VERDICT Dense and intense, energized and anguished, this strong first outing has storytelling appeal.

Library Journal