Catrachos

In this blistering debut, Guzmán exorcises ghosts of past and present traumas—some personal, many cultural—with raw, unflinching commentary on queer identity and the immigrant experience. The book’s title is a Spanish term for Hondurans, and Guzmán writes with pride of their national identity while exploring how cultural biases have affected them as a queer person. A series of poems titled “Queerodactyl” feature a dinosaur greeting an oncoming asteroid with defiance, vowing to survive, “phoenixes on the dance floor—thrusting in the face of loss.” Elsewhere, Guzmán reflects on growing up as a Honduran immigrant with limited means in America, shadowing their mother as she cleaned houses for a living, wondering about the point of it all: “Haven’t we already gambled our future kingdom—& lost?” The poet’s imagery is consistently haunting, though its meaning is occasionally hindered by non-sequiturs and abstruse language (“twiggy panoplies... machomanic evacuation asteroid”). Guzmán's elegy for those killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting, however, is stunning: “I am afraid of attending places that celebrate our bodies because that’s also where our bodies have been cancelled.” This is a courageous polemic against a growing moral bankruptcy in America, as well as a tender personal story delivered with effortless lyricism. (May)

This review has been updated to reflect the pronouns used by the book's author.