Overview

Through lyric and narrative poems alike, the speaker of the poems in Crash Course attempts to understand the manner in which cultural traditions and expectations shape their understanding of the world. Watching a father patch up a truck ponders the effect of language across generations. A simple knock on the door provides a meditation on the immigrant experience, and the anxiety surrounding what it means to arrive with nothing in a different country. Other poems look at the complexity of familial relationships, dissecting specific moments that although appear mundane on the surface (shopping for items to put on layaway, barbecues, watching a cousin feed his pet snake), are - once fleshed out on the page - profound episodes that enlighten a labyrinth of memories.

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9781732952133

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Reviews

An honesty-fueled catalogue of the subjunctive framed by the Mexican-American experience, an authentic viewfinder into the lives of Latinx families, Crash Course contains both a summary and reckoning of familial history and its various tributaries. Read this as witness. Read this as testimony. Read it as education, in an era when Latinx bodies are increasingly marginalized and erased. --Rodney Gomez, author of Ceremony of Sand One of the most honest and heartfelt collections I've encountered, Crash Course confronts toxic masculinity and machismo by way of an empathic, tender speaker who understands there is more than one way / for a body to be held. What holds this marvel of a book together, too, are the journeys that arrived him there, the son of two immigrants--how family, like memory, shows us we can love things / without owning them, that we can pray / we'll someday return. Read these poems and return to the things you love, to those who got you here. --Matty Layne Glasgow, author of deciduous qween Crash Course draws its strength from images and experiences from the collective and individual unconscious. Rodriguez sets down, with musical poise and emotional sophistication, moments of glory and shame, terror and tenderness. Without flinching or resorting to the saccharine, he takes inventory of his family, his childhood, and, with the resources of a painter, gives us an indelible, enduring portrait of this time and place. --Jason Myers, The EcoTheo Review

Author Information

Esteban Rodriguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, (Dis)placement, and the micro-chapbook Soledad. His poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor at the EcoTheo Review and is a regular reviews contributor at PANK Magazine and Heavy Feather Review. He lives with his family and teaches high school in Austin, Texas.

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