In his award-winning first book, J. Michael Martinez reenvisions Latino poetics and its current conceptions of cultural identity. In Heredities, he opens a historically ravaged continental body through a metaphysical dissection into Being and silence. The hand manipulates a surgical etymology through the spine: the longitude where
history gathers in the name we never are.
The poems seek to speak beyond codified aesthetics and dictated identity politics in order to recognise a territory of
irreducible otherness
where the self’s sinew may be
reeved through revelation
and where, finally, one finds
obscurity bonded to light.
This stunning collection heralds the arrival of an important new voice in American poetry.