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Homeland of My Body by Richard Blanco
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Homeland of My Body

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Homeland of My Body by Richard Blanco
Hardcover $25.95
Oct 24, 2023 | ISBN 9780807012970

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    Oct 24, 2023 | ISBN 9780807012970

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Praise

“Tender and introspective. . . . An exceptional mid-career snapshot of a trailblazing poet’s remarkable journey.”
Booklist

“Accessible and sincere, Blanco’s poems may sometimes play tag with unmasked sentiment, but they are equally capable of sharp commentary and a keen engagement with contemporary American life.”
Library Journal

“Some of his narrations are strong and precise, while others are rhythmic, especially his closing poems, which employ repetition and sounds that are almost song-like. Blanco’s poems are full of life and warmth.”
AudioFile Magazine

“What a gift, this new gathering of poems from the singular Richard Blanco. A cause for rejoicing!”
—Krista Tippett, author of Being Wise and host of On Being

“Blanco’s poems are journeys to a homeland within the heart, a welcome homecoming earned from a lifetime’s wise voyaging.”
—Sandra Cisneros

“Richard Blanco’s Homeland of My Body is a triumphant anthem to a rich life in all its ages and awakenings. ‘What should I do? / Every thing.’ These stunning new poems, astonishing in their generosity, cradle so many long-loved ones, that a full, new world is created—not broken into parts at all, but wholly realized, and utterly moving.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

“A masterful poet who is clear-eyed and full of heart, Blanco explores the country’s haunted past while offering a bright hope for the future.”
—Ada Limón

“What I love about Blanco’s work is the lustiness of the poems; they have bodies, there’s such sensuality to the language, such flexibility to the line; and they display such delight in form, an unapologetic love for the world. He has become a poet who sings for all of us with the inclusivity and passion of a Whitman and the particularity and absorption in the quotidian of a William Carlos Williams, the street smarts of a Langston Hughes, the oratorical grandness of an MLK.”
—Julia Alvarez

“There is a uniting oneness to these passionate and remarkable poems, each finely wrought line a bridge from one heart to another, a love song of this burdened earth and all its flawed inhabitants. Richard Blanco is this century’s Walt Whitman.”
—Andre Dubus III

“Richard Blanco writes about the elusive poundingness of love.”
—Eileen Myles

“In these times of hate, we need poets who speak of love.”
—Martín Espada

Table Of Contents

Radiant Beings: New Poems Part 1

The Splintering
—playing god—
Why I Needed To
Until This: An Ekphrastic Ars Poetica
Questioning Villa Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
Radiant Beings: Photos by Joyce Tenneson
—anatomy of light—
To the Artist of the Invisible
Big Wood River
What You Didn’t Let Us Lose
Music in Our Hands
Visiting Elizabeth: A Glosa
What Governs Us
Maine Yet Miami
Upon a Time: Surfside, Miami

From City of a Hundred Fires

América
La Revolución at Antonio’s Mercado
Mango, Number 61
Shaving
Mother Picking Produce
The Silver Sands
324 Mendoza Avenue, #6
Havanasis
Varadero en Alba
El Jagua Resort
Found Letters from 1965: El Año de la Agricultura
El Cucubano
Décima Guajira
Palmita Mía
Palmita Mía

From Directions to the Beach of the Dead

Time as Art in the Eternal City
A Poet in Venice
We’re Not Going to Malta . . .
Somewhere to Paris
Torsos at the Louvre
After Barcelona, in Barcelona
Directions to the Beach of the Dead
Winter of the Volcanoes: Guatemala
Bargaining with a Goddess
Return from El Cerrado
Silent Family Clips
Papá’s Bridge
What’s Love Got to Do?
Visiting Metaphors at South Point
Translation for Mamá
The Perfect City Code
When I Was a Little Cuban Boy
Looking for Blackbirds, Hartford
How Can You Love New York?
No More Than This, Provincetown
Crossing Boston Harbor
Mexican Almuerzo in New England
where it begins—where it ends

From Looking for the Gulf Motel

Looking for The Gulf Motel
Betting on America
Taking My Cousin’s Photo at the Statue of Liberty
The Island Within
Practice Problem
El Florida Room
Afternoons as Endora
Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother
Maybe
Thicker Than Country
Killing Mark
Cooking with Mamá in Maine
My Father in My Hands
Since Unfinished

From How to Love a Country

Como Tú / Like You / Like Me
Complaint of El Río Grande
Leaving in the Rain: Limerick, Ireland
Island Body
Matters of the Sea
Mother Country
My Father in English
El Americano in the Mirror
Using Country in a Sentence
American Wandersong
Imaginary Exile
Let’s Remake America Great
Until We Could
between [another door]
One Pulse—One Poem
Seventeen Funerals
America the Beautiful, Again
What I Know of Country
And So We All Fall Down
Declaration of Inter-Dependence
Cloud Anthem

Here I Am: New Poems Part 2

Uncertain-Sea Principle
Seashore: An Ovillejo
Hineni
Weather of My Weathering
Life Without Rain
Thank You: For Not Letting Me Die
Bluejay Dialogue: An Ovillejo
The Cutting
Writing Home
For the Homeland of My Body
Become Me
Reverse Bucket List
Time Capsule
Living Will
Self to Self
Anti-Poem
A Good Day to Die
Moonrise
Say This Isn’t the End

Notes
Credits
Acknowledgments

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