Overview

Wishbones is a hybrid memoir-in-verse that blends poetry, prose, and photography to explore what it means to grow up Costa Rican-American between two cultures, two languages, and two versions of home. In this intimate coming-of-age collection, Elena Montes reconstructs a childhood shaped by family separation, sibling loss, and her father's struggle with alcoholism. Structured through a nonlinear, memoir-driven form, the book traces her journey from adolescence into adulthood as she grapples with identity, love, friendship, and the complicated inheritance of culture from an immigrant parent. When language itself begins to slip away, what remains? Montes examines the experience of losing fluency in Spanish while trying to preserve a connection to the father and heritage tied to it. Blending lyrical poetry with candid prose and striking photographs, Wishbones captures both the dramatic ruptures and the quiet, formative moments that shape belonging. Throughout the collection, Montes navigates the tension between family loyalty and self-preservation, connection and distance, asking: how do we reclaim a culture tied to complicated love? How do we rebuild memory when the past resists coherence? Tender, unflinching, and formally inventive, Wishbones will resonate with readers of hybrid memoir, Latinx literature, and coming-of-age narratives exploring addiction, grief, identity, and the enduring search for home. The final poem in the collection received the Andrea K. Wilson Award for Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College.

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Reviews

Reading Elena's poems ""Mi Media Naranja,"" ""Funeral,"" & ""Wishbones,"" I find them both direct and quiet-speaking from the bone, the orange, the iron water- they resonate with an emotional clarity of vision. -Chessy Normile Author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Part, recipient of the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize ​​Precise and vivid, these poems cut to the heart-honest in voice, sharply crafted, deeply vulnerable, and powerfully compelling. -Mandy Kahn Author and performer of Gateways to Peace performed at the Getty and the Barrick Museums-Innovator of ""immersive poems""-Best American Poetry selectee-American Life of Poetry selectee

Author Information

Elena Montes is a Costa Rican-American poet, fiction writer, and artist, originally from Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she received the 2024 Andrea Klein Wilson Award for Poetry for two poems featured in her debut collection, Wishbones. Now, Elena lives in her adoptive city of New York with her partner and cat. When she's not writing in her journal, she can be found cooking family-style meals for friends and sharing memories around the dinner table-an extension of her love for storytelling and connection.

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