At the Park on the Edge of the Country: Poems Book Cover

At the Park on the Edge of the Country

Poems

Austin Araujo

72 pp. 5.5 x 8.5

Pub Date: EXPECTED February, 2025

Subjects: Poetry
Latinx & Latin American Studies

Series: The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize

Imprint: Mad Creek

Preorder Paperback $16.95   ISBN: 978-0-8142-5936-8

“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

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