Overview

Poetry collection by Lupe Mendez, poet, teacher and activist. Why I Am Like Tequila is a collection of poetry spanning a decade of writing and performance. This collection exists in 4 parts - each a layered perspective, a look through a Mexican/ Mexican-American voice living in the Texas Gulf Coast. Set within spaces such as Galveston Island, Houston, the Rio Grande Valley and Jalisco, Mexico, these poems peel away at all parts, like the maguey, drawing to craft spirits, quenching a thirst between land and sea.

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9781732209176

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Reviews

Why I Am Like Tequila is one of the most exciting books to come out in years. Mendez takes us on a wild ride from birth, to family, to community, with a master's control of language and with gritos that sing and yawp and cry from the rooftops of the Americas. Unpredictable, imaginative, necessary, these poems introduce us to an important new poet for our generation. --Daniel Chacon, Author of Hotel Juarez Why I Am Like Tequila is all beautiful blue / maguey veins stretching along the Gulf Coast, where borderlands and littorals meet. Indigenous Tejanx consciousness digs deep beneath the dystopian headlines (hurricanes, immigration officers) and finds a million interconnected howls, in raw, cleansing songs about fathers, elders, lovers, neighbors, and children (the only, the never born, the never dead). Against Keats, Lupe Mendez seeks out a translingual beauty-truth ( inside I wanted el toque de luz ) and insists on those untranslatable moments when tongue slurs and language jettisons / out into the gulf. From found poetry to a Spanish pantoum, Mendez's writing performs the act of island where I hold myself against this want and we dig dance move with him. This is poetry about the contradictions of contemporary Brown masculinity and its discontents, about our island-cities and their archipelagos, about the blessings and curses of familia; in other words, urgent reading. With its heart of agave ( Mi corazon es un mezontle ), this book is firmly rooted in an expanded frontera, full of love and libations for our Americas. --Urayoan Noel, Author of Buzzing Hemispheres/Rumor Hemisferico

Author Information

Poet, teacher, and activist Lupe Mendez is the author of the poetry collection Why I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books, 2019). He earned an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Texas at El Paso. Mendez is one of the founders of the Librotraficante Movement and of Tintero Projects, a Texas based grassroots organization that works to provide a platform for emerging Latinx writers and writers of color within the Gulf Coast Region and beyond. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Macondo, and the Crescendo Literary/Poetry Foundation's Poetry Incubator.

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