Desgraciado

""By treating the figure of Diego as both enemy and lover, Dominguez attempts to subvert his enduring influence, holding the colonizer in his own purgatory... This is an intimate embrace of personal struggle, but Dominguez also takes many opportunities to highlight the resiliency of all those who were colonized across centuries of violence.""—Harriet ""Our greatest epistolary poet seeks catharsis and self by addressing a genocidal colonizer directly."" —Henry Hoke, BUTT Magazine""With Desgraciado, you deploy a stripped-down understanding of performance that is simply survival, both in terms of your money and creativity. But also, survival in the sense of your ancestral survival, as refusal.""—BOMB ""Dominguez writes with a profound intensity. [...] Common themes of colonization, racism, and homophobia permeate the collection and descriptions of violence sit uncomfortably alongside images of flowers and nature. But this discomfort is vital to the collection’s impact.""—Book Riot ""Angel Dominguez has given us a weapon, a codex with which to fortify and record a new communication.""—Boom California ""With repeated images of fire and ghosts, and all the echoes of our colonized world, Dominguez pens the most tender vengeance."" —Vagabond City ""Rather than retell the colonizer’s version, Dominguez challenges the notion that history is in the past... This collection does not seek to resolve or ‘forgive and forget’ the past, calling instead for descendants of oppression to expose and retaliate against systems that perpetuate that oppression however they can. For the narrator, that is through writing."" —Letras Latinas Blog ""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 ""Desgraciado takes the embers of the colonizer, the knowing and people they attempted to extinguish, and chooses to 'press on with ancestral compass disarming my enemy with language.' A relentless re-imagining of an epistolary series that never looks away while staring into the eyes of the murderous. Dominguez invokes a portal, tracing the crimes of 1562 Mani Yucatán to the present, all while holding 'a mess of flowers' that have survived pyre and empire. These words are incantations, ransoms, clapbacks, curses, intimacies, provocations, and remedies that reveal themselves as navigational cyphers guiding us toward a language and future of liberation."" —Anthony Cody ""What do we need from a poetry collection anymore? What emerges from the tender dialogic pulse of the epistolary? Desgraciado belies its title, brings grace to the intercambio, symbiosis to the lyric. This book has formal invention throughout, blood and tears too. Angel Dominguez ruthlessly breaks pyramids open in a resistance to the whiteness that defines how they navigate the intersecting colonizations they call home: masculinity, the academy, the state, and the earth. This book is also heartbreakingly tinged with the pursuit of weaving with the other in a dismantled world."" —Carmen Giménez Smith ""Ángel Dominguez writes against the ontological inertia that lives at the vertices that activate the colonial wound. What does it mean to fashion the kaleidoscopic self out of the ancestral rubble where a language, deprived and forgotten, persists? In Desgraciado Dominguez raises their lantern into the labyrinth where horror, corruption and banality collide with a complicated desire for obfuscation and relief from the pain of being held hostage to our most recognizable dispossessions. These admissions of furious want made in the raging lyric of the epistolary form tremble on every page. A would-be fugitive truth-teller to ignite a resistance movement, Dominguez looks over their shoulder in the realms that exalted Diego de Landa. I can't think of a higher honor for a writer."" —Raquel Gutiérrez ""It's not even the evil that's irredeemable; it's the idea that there was ever a grace worth hoarding. Ángel Domínguez taught me this when once I said to them something like, 'try writing a letter to your oppressor,' and in response they made this dreamway into the center point of colonial genocide only to thread back the entire fabric of spacetime into a billowing folding and unfolding that lifts the lie of ourselves long enough for our first breath to begin. Everyone, disgraced, enters on the inhale. On each exhale, disgraced, we sense how we're 'polishing our dreams into something resembling a mirror, only more luminous.'"" —Farid Matuk   ""Put these poems under your pillow so that you will have medicina from nightmares. Speak these poems out loud and you will inhale memorias and exhale the sangre of century old wounds... Desgraciado is a Pochx holy, healing text told from our side of time donde the colonizer is the ghost, is the past y nosotrxs somos the living, the future… Angelito’s letters to the pinche colonizer are portals, cenotes on the page that open up a profundo space in this Western void that allows our brown skin movement and luz and gives us answers to preguntas we have not been allowed to ask. Desgraciado is a piece of obsidian you look deep into. These poems will help you find your missing huesos."" —Josiah Luis Alderete