“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
“The lushness of the language, the precision of the images, the humor, the deft and digressive narratives—these poems are so beautiful. But I am most moved by and keep going back to the wrenching, complicated, grown-ass poems about fathers, and about fathers and sons: by how patient Araujo is in those poems, how he lets them answer to music, and love.” —Ross Gay
“From the peripheries of oblivion, Austin Araujo coaxes honey from rock to deliver us At the Park on the Edge of the Country. . . . These poems of sensorial majesty enact the continuous process of becoming human. Their specificity, propulsive action, and deft panning from Arkansas to California and across generations remind me how miraculous the overlooked elements are of the worlds we build with our own two hands—how like reclaimed magic, inevitable and necessary.” —Paul Tran
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 unmask 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
