VIRTUAL EVENT: Local author Angel Dominguez will join us online to discuss their recently released book of poetry, DESGRACIADO (the collected letters)—a collection of epistolary poems that exorcise and explore the material violence and generational trauma of colonization and systemic racism stored within queer Latinx memory. Dominguez will be joined by Anthony Cody at this special event.
Watch a replay of this virtual event here!
In DESGRACIADO, Angel Dominguez navigates a visceral constellation of language and memory, illuminating the ongoing traumas of misremembered and missing histories, and their lasting impacts. Dominguez unravels a critical and tender language of lived experience in letters addressed to their ancestral oppressor, Diego de Landa, (a Spanish friar who attempted to destroy the written Maya language in Mani Yucatán, on July 12th 1562), to articulate an old rage, dreaming of a futurity beyond the wreckage and ruin of the colonial imaginary. This collection doesn’t seek to heal the incurable wound of colonization so much as attempt to re-articulate a language towards recuperation.
"We need each other and we need each other's words. We need freedom the way we need each other, the way we need love. It is a need that only understands its fulfillment or loss. Those who oppress us will never fulfill us. That is why this book is a book about desire, because the desire for freedom structures colonial relations, and the impossibility of its fulfillment drives colonial production. Dominguez has always understood this." —Raquel Salas Rivera, from the foreword
Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the Santa Cruz Mountains in Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of Desgraciado (the collected letters) (Nightboat Books, 2021), ROSESUNWATER (The Operating System, 2021) and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015). Angel earned a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.
Anthony Cody is from Fresno, CA with lineage in both the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. His debut collection, Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020) won the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Prize, a 2021 American Book Award, and a 2020 Southwest Book Award, as well as recognized as a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN America / Jean Stein Award, the L.A. Times Book Award, among others. He serves as an editor for Omnidawn and Noemi Press.
