Americón

“Not even trees falling/ from fruit can pick / my body off this ground.” In Nico Vela Page’s 𝑨𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒄ó𝒏, conventional distances between bodies, land, gender, and language are thrown into new embrace, gardened into poems with sweet, lush aplomb and tenderness. 𝑨𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒄ó𝒏 swallows up the slur within its title with the hot ecopoetic breath of queer, translanguaging multi-grammars. With halted breath—“Sm,all trees/Scrib,bled brush/Low cact,us”—and love of kin, from hummingbird pecks to ditch bitch politics, this is a book that lovingly expands the endpoints of the continuum.

—Sawako Nakayasu