Stepmotherland

by Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Overview

Stepmotherland is a tour—de—force debut collection about coming of age, coming out, and coming to America.

Winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full—length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.

Holnes’s poems experiment with macaronic language, literary forms, and prosody. In their inventiveness, they create a new tradition that blurs the borders between poetry, visual art, and dramatic text. The new legacy he creates is one with significant reverence for the past, which informs a central desire of immigrants and native—born citizens alike: the desire for a better life. Stepmotherland documents an artist’s evolution into manhood and heralds the arrival of a stunning new poetic voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268202163
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Series:	Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro—Panamanian American writer and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Poetry). His poems have previously appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. Holnes is a Cave Canem and CantoMundo fellow who has earned scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Postgraduate Writers Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and residencies nationwide, including a residency at MacDowell. His poem "Praise Song for My Mutilated World" won the C. P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International. He is an assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches creative writing and playwriting, and a faculty member of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Read an Excerpt

When My Mother Gives Up Her American Dream to Marry My Father

She always knew

it was coming, the harpy on

horseback, deity of her dreams with a

grey and white feathered halo for a crown.

I never understood religious offering,

giving back to creators something

they could so easily take themselves, whether it be

taking her lamming for slaughter or taking her

dreams deferred of becoming a

nurse like Diahann Carroll’s Julia on

US TV stations that my mother watched

as a little Black girl in the Panamá of the 1960s.

Julia’s good looks are an act of

defiance. Black women on

TV were never that beautiful.

My mother takes note and

offers my father her

velvet on their wedding night.

He crushes it to bring the

beauty out of the thing

like all men taught

by their fathers to

press a grape for wine or a

body for blood when it was the only

red the village men said he should take for a

wife, when it was the only kind of

woman the village men said he should take for

love. There’s always a bit of

violence to sacrifice; flesh

crushed under the pressure of

other people’s expectations, giving

life to the machos, the patrones, the pelaos, like me.

The blow of birthing machismo is only softened by

promises of sainthood, promises of

power over man now that her only

son was going to be one.

Table of Contents

Foreigner
1. When My Mother Gives Up Her American Dream to Marry My Father
2. Praise Song for My Mutilated World
3. Scenes from Operation Just Cause
4. 20 de Diciembre, 1989: When the U.S. Invades Panamá
5. When the Narcos Kidnap JuanFe
6. The Art of Diplomacy
7. Bread Pudding Grandmamma
8. Poder

Inmigrante
9. Tú
10. Conception
11. How to Dream About a Woman
12. ba—by
13. Pietà by Michelangelo: Marble, 1499
14. OTM or Other Than Mexican
15. Mirror Woman
16. Marvelous Sugar Baby

Citizen
17. Cristo Negro de Portobelo
18. African—Americanize
19. African Klan Suit #2
20. Ferguson, USA
21. Links
22. Ode to My Father, The Captain
23. Breaking & Entering
24. Angelitos Negros

Patriot
25. The Down—Low Messiahs
26. Power Bottom
27. Vinyl
28. I Always Promised I’d Never Do Drag
29. Arroz Con Pollo
30. Joseph on Knowledge in the Biblical Sense
31. All Legs Lead to Naomi Campbell
32. Rihanna & Child
33. Naturalization
34. Black Parade
35. Homecoming

Notes

Acknowledgments