Tune in to hear poet Tomas Q. Morin discuss his new collection Machete in conversation with James Arthur! This is a virtual event please register here
This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts.
“Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca” (“God squeezes, but He doesn’t strangle”)—the epigraph of Machete—sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there’s an invisible hand at your throat. Tomás Morín hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore.
In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: “Whiteface” is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; “Duct Tape” lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself.
One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morín considers our obsession with suffering—“the pain in which we trust”—and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have.
About the Author:
Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero and A Larger Country, winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He translated Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu and with Mari L’Esperance, he coedited Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine.
About the moderator:
James Arthur was born in Connecticut and grew up in Canada. He is the author of the poetry collection The Suicide's Son (Véhicule Press 2019) and Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press 2012).
Arthur's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a visiting fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University.