This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and
well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a
thousand cuts.
**"Morín's writing uses the mundane details of everyday life...as a
jumping-off point for creating fascinating and philosophical worlds."
--LitHub
**
"Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't
strangle")--the epigraph of Machete--sets the stage for a powerful
poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an
invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains
of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that
ever-changing shore.
In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie
Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire.
They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: "Whiteface" is a list
of instructions for people stopped by the police; "Duct Tape" lauds our
domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself.
One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morín considers our obsession with
suffering--"the pain in which we trust"--and finds that the best answer
to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always
via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have.
