Cowboy Park

Familial and queer desires pulse with tenderness and nostalgia in Martínez-Leyva’s excellent debut. Brilliantly orchestrated in three movements that mirror stages of exile and return, the collection orbits around the disappearance of Angelo, the speaker’s brother, whose absence haunts these poems. Martínez-Leyva renders this loss in language that refuses easy consolation, as in “Portrait of an Absent Brother,” in which memory distills to its essential elements: “The way his fingers/ pushed back/ my hair—/ this is what I choose to remember.” The poet’s code-switching between English and Spanish creates syncopation, echoing the linguistic in-betweenness his multilingual speakers navigate. His subversive reclamation of Western imagery—cowboys, horses, desert landscapes—to explore queer desire and cultural displacement is particularly striking. In the poems “Vaquero” and “Show Pony,” traditional masculine images become sites of both danger and liberation: “Take me mercilessly: skinned knees and jacked-up teeth.” These poems reveal the fine line between desire and loss with unflinching beauty. (Nov.)