Thrown in the Throat

Much will be written, I suspect, about the many identities that Benjamin Garcia explores in his debut collection, Thrown in the Throat . . . But I hope that in the process, reviewers don't overlook the lyrical inventiveness and formal prowess that Garcia displays in these poems. It's that melding of craft and subject and language that makes this an extraordinary collection. -The Rumpus, July 2020 Rumpus Poetry Book Club Selection Thrown in the Throat by Benjamin Garcia speaks in tongues-tongues as vehicles of language, oppression, expression and desire; tongues full of humor and wordplay whose light touch add weight to larger issues of loss and memory and agency. This is voice that conveys confidence and pride even as it illuminates a feeling of otherness . . . Garcia crowns these poems with a masterful diction and sophistication of turn and image that shows his poetry will reign for a long time. -RHINO Sometimes you find a book so good you wished to have written it. Better even than that is when you find a book you know you couldn't have written, had neither the emotional resources nor technical approaches to have written. For me, Thrown in the Throat is such a book; it has deadly superpowers, upending all my old-school queer feelings of shame and belligerence. Instead it gloriously stakes new territory in queerness. Camp has always been on the other side of the coin from death, but in Benjamin Garcia's debut, fierce life demands its due. These poems are heir to a lineage that might include Allen Ginsberg's 'Please Master' or Mark Doty's 'Homo Will Not Inherit' or Rebecca Byrkit's 'Whoa.' Rather than any Grecian urn teaching a reader about truth and beauty, here we find the visceral and immediate energy of contemporary life. Here it is not the archaic torso, a ruin of the past, but the voluptuous kinetic power of Adam Rippon's rear end in all its triple-axel glory that enjoins the reader to change their life. When a poet whose arsenal includes bliss, jouissance, and adulterated pleasure commands it, you better listen. Crown him, yes. -Kazim Ali In his inventive and daring debut, Benjamin Garcia confesses 'my mouth has many uses: / eat, sing, bite, kiss, but most of all / insinuate.' He gleefully tongues words; muscles syllables into sonic-rich lines attuned to public and private dictions, histories. I love his unrepentant and acrobatic language. This collection is furiously queer, ecstatic, bilingual, sarcastic. It refutes shame and doesn't plea for forgiveness. Thrown in the Throat is a spectacular debut that'll be studied and read for a long time. -Eduardo C. Corral Benjamin Garcia's Thrown in the Throat bites with acidity, sexiness, and a fearless wit that carves a fascinating world where diamonds scatter across corpse flowers and pitcher plants, the stings of a man-of-war unearth the difference between venom and poison, and a boy lives in a closet that transforms into the glass shell of an enormous sea snail. Language is often the target of Garcia's interrogations, and in the process of exposing it as a colonial tool, he molds its awe and messiness into his own ammunition: 'Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages. In these heartbreaking and funny poems, Garcia investigates what makes a son, queer and brown, in an America where the white star on a Texas flag is also 'the open throat of a cottonmouth.' This superb debut aims for all of our throats, and (hell yes!) we let it. -Sally Wen Mao This book is a slut. Immigrant smut, propaganda for the fag agenda. Wonderstruck, I tuck this book deep and close. Benjamin Garcia's freaky, stunning debut decimates and salivates over language like a good switch. Moving language around. Moving language out of the way. Being moved. Vers(e). How can you not love how this poet loves, how these poems hate and revenge and lurk? Twerk? Too easy. How they buck, bottom, and frot. They take lemons and let them be fucking lemons. Screw the sweet. Thrown in the Throat doesn't hide what's bitter. It crowns it. -Danez Smith