"Winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Cornelius Eady--an exploration in verse of imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be allegorically coded with the transhistorical consequences of an imperial sociopolitical narrative. Engaging eighteenth-century Mexican casta paintings, the morbid lynching...

"Survival Strategies is a love story wrapped in a reckoning. Arranged in three parts, the arc follows a speaker who is returning to the Sonoran of her birth after many years away. In the course of the first section, "The Sunniest Place on Earth," we learn that the speaker has developed a deep hatred of the desert (a reflection of herself) due to the way she was treated and what she witnessed while being raised there. As we move through to part two,...