About this item

Searing verses set on the Mexican border about war and addiction, love and sexual violence, grief and loss, from an American Book Award-winning author. Selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series. El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across the river, Ciudad Jurez suffers a history of femicides and a horrific drug war. Witnessing this, a Filipina's life unravels as she tries to love an addict, the murders growing just a city - but the breadth of a country - away. This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much "a body will hold," reaching from the border to the poet's own Philippines. These poems thirst in the desert, want for water, searching the brutal and tender territories between bodies, families, and nations.



About the Author

Sasha Pimentel

Born in Manila, Philippines and raised in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Sasha Pimentel is the author of For Want of Water (Beacon Press, forthcoming in October 2017) , selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series. She is also the author of Insides She Swallowed (West End Press, 2010) , winner of the 2011 American Book Award. Selected by Philip Levine, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Joy Williams and John Guare as a finalist for the 2015 Rome Prize in Literature (American Academy of Arts and Letters) , her work has been recently published or is forthcoming in such journals as American Poetry Review, Guernica, New England Review and Crazyhorse, among others.
 
She is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, on the border of Ciudad Juárez, México, to students from all over the Americas in their bilingual (Spanish-English) MFA Program, and affiliated faculty in the Chican@ Studies Program. Winner of the 2015 University of Texas System's Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award, Sasha teaches contemporary American poetry, poetry writing and creative nonfiction writing with research emphases in race, class, immigration and gender, particularly in the context of Asian American, Black, Jewish American and Latin American poetics.

(Photo by Jorge Salgado)



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