“Achy Obejas’s prose poems in The Boy Kingdom are mind-boggling, unpredictable, heart-quaking. One of her dazzling acts of magic is to filter her sons’ experiences through her own, so they mingle and coexist in the heart-gripping daily dramas of parenting amid divorce, death, immigration, and survival. Generously, she gives us twins of each of these lush, lyrical poems, so that the book is doubled—one rendition in English and one self-translated into Spanish. In this magnificent multilingual feat, both poignant versions are original love notes to her sons.”
—Rachel Galvin, author of Uteropia
“This collection is a string of sapphires—a union of poems that are unyielding in their fierce honesty and transparent in their raw tenderness. Light flows through, reflecting a nuanced spectrum of the joy and challenge of navigating relationships with those we hold closely. She carves into the flesh and bone of our most intimate connections. Here motherhood is opened to reveal the sacred and raw challenge of how we must learn to navigate ourselves to guide our children. It interrogates the complexity of what we cherish and inspires us to pay attention to how love can both wound and fortify. It is a jewel.”
—Emily Hooper Lansana, artistic director, SOL Collective: Storytelling by Women of Color
“Boys. They’re irascible, a rain of needles. Snotty. Skinned shins, teeth always just a little wrong. But sons are different. Sons are shabby miracles. They bristle and bloom, and hurtle into their lives unfeared, yelping, head-first, and adamantly dragging their mamas’ hearts with them. The Boy Kingdom, Achy Obejas’s heart-bending familial lyric, is an unleashed outpouring of love for her two boys, as well as a reflection on the poet’s place within a fervent lineage of women. Every word does work in these lean, muscular prose poems, each one unreeling like a snippet of cinema joining to tell one of our most traditionally elusive stories: the tenacious bond between mothers and sons, how it heaves and heaves toward breaking, how it never does.”
—Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler
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