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.17|Dimensions:
5.98 x .34 x 8.98 inches
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Description
Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry
Winner of the National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Cornelius Eady--an exploration in verse of imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity
"Marvelous, argumentative, and curiosity-provoking" --The New York Times Book Review
The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be coded with the trans-historical consequences of an imperial narrative. Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings, morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans, the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath, and fashioned under, a racializing aesthetic gaze. Martinez questions how "knowledge" of the body is organized through visual perception of that body, hypothesizing the corporeal as a repository of the human situation, a nexus of culture. Museum of the Americas' poetic revives and repurposes the persecuted ethnic body from the appropriations that render it an art object and, therefore, diposable.
About the Author
A Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, J. Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book, "Heredities." "In the Garden of the Bridehouse," is available from the University of Arizona Press.His third collection, "Museum of the Americas," was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press.J. Michael's next work, “Tarta Americana” will be published by Penguin September of 2023. An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University, he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose.About his work, Herrera wrote, it "breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity. Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken—lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests—gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago. This body, though flayed and fractured, rises and sings."
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