“Simply cinematic—utterly memorable and moving. In these fierce and fiery poems of goldenrod and tostadas, Araujo covers satisfying and crackling ground. An imaginative debut.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
In At the Park on the Edge of the Country, Austin Araujo maps the intricacies of memory, immigration, and belonging through the experiences of one Mexican American family—his own—in the rural American South, crystallizing memory and self-knowledge as collaborative, multivocal affairs. Human and nonhuman voices and the competing landscapes of childhood and adulthood propel these poems, offering an unyielding portrait of a family’s endless encounters with the shortcomings of citizenship. Speakers sleep like tostadas, mistake hikers crossing a small river in Arkansas for a migrant father, and hold onto silence through difficult conversations in the fields and in the city. Revelatory and striking, these poems reinvent origin myths to reveal the contradictory and expansive astonishments of Mexican American identity in the twenty-first century.
Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, his poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Gulf Coast. At the Park on the Edge of the Country is his first book.
Contents
I.
Another Crossing
Sight and Sound
A Mexican American Novel
My Documentary
The Tostada
Translation
At the Park on the Edge of the Country
Within Earshot of 1991
Lost Year
At Lake Temescal
Aperture
II.
The Bull
Clearing
Watching Him Cross
After
Someone Is the Water
Debut
Another Look
Sancho Panza
Betting the House
At the Park on the Edge of the White River
The Father
III.
Gathering
Jamboree, Evening, Midsummer
On the Road to Irapuato
Irapuato
Mexican in the Meadow
Early Conversation with My American Grandmother
Maintenance
My Condition
In Body Sweet
Brothers
Notes
Acknowledgments
