Heredities

the long version

In his award-winning first book, J. Michael Martinez reenvisions Latino poetics and its current conceptions of cultural identity. In Heredities, he opens a historically ravaged continental body through a metaphysical dissection into Being and silence. The hand manipulates a surgical etymology through the spine: the longitude where history gathers in the name we never are. The poems seek to speak beyond codified aesthetics and dictated identity politics in order to recognize a territory of irreducible otherness where the selfÆs sinew may be reeved through revelation and where, finally, one f.