Boomerang / Bumerán

Praise

“This is Obejas’s mission, with each poem, each line, each word—to make the world a better place, to let hope live.”
—Ploughshares

“Achy Obejas’s Boomerang comes hurtling at you, maddening, sharp-edged, in wild, aerodynamic swerve across a ‘jeweled sea, flickering with caution,’ flung past limits of language, tragedy, history, to circle back through Ana Mendieta, José Martí, a synagogue in Pittsburgh . . . . There are far more than two sides to the dualities this work takes aim at with shattering skill.”
—Esther Allen, author of Your New Name

“Achy Obejas launches a boomerang into the future so it can come back with sacred news about the human condition.”
—Rita Indiana, author of Tentacle

“These poems ring like bells that toll for all we’ve lost, yet proclaim all we strive to reclaim; they sing like a choir of lyrical harmonies that praise yet lament heritage, sexuality, love, and language; they mesmerize us like meditations that transfix with the promise of ascension.”
—Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country

“Boomerang is a dazzling, groundbreaking poetic and bi-linguistic achievement. It is inventively unlike anything I’ve ever read yet invokes the intense familiar: wonderment, heartbreak, pathos, and love.”
—Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin

“Like her outstanding novels and short stories, Achy Obejas’s Boomerang is a revelation of striking language authored anew in both English and Spanish. In this astounding and incantatory book, Obejas takes us on a journey through the ravages of the heart, via childhood, exile, lost loves, and, eventually, return. Boomerang is a profound and eloquent book filled with hard-earned beauty, wonder, and, ultimately, joy.”
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside

“The much-needed hope that comes with love defines these poems, shapes their lush epiphanies, their celebration of beloveds of all sorts, not just humans but also political convictions and the wide ranging geographies of various cities. These are the poems that we need so much right now as they remind us about the transformative promise that manifests when we brush up against each other and the inclusive, generous world that can come out of those moments.”
—Juliana Spahr, author of Well Then There Now

“In these poems of ‘love in the time of . . . ,’ Achy Obejas is as consumed by the terrifying sensuality of love and the politics of bodies in intimate dialogue with each other as she is about ‘the time of . . .’ of war, of disenfranchisement, of violence, and of political instability. Boomerang/Bumerán is filled with elegant bilingual meditations that become defiant acts of protest against silencing and against the social and political pressure to deny our desire to feel fully and be deliciously alive in a troubled world.”
—Kwame Dawes, author of Nebraska