Books in the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize series

My Kill Adore Him is a collection of poems from Andres Montoya Poetry Prize-winner Paul Martinez Pompa. With a unique, independent voice, Martinez Pompa interrogates masculinity, race, language, consumerism, and cultural identity in poems that honor los olvidados, the forgotten ones, who range from the usual suspects brutalized by police to factory workers poisoned by their environment, from the victim of a homophobic beating in the boys' bathroom to the body of Juan Doe at the Cook County Coroner's Office. Some of the poems rely on somber, at times brutal, imagery to articulate a political stance while others use sarcasm and irony to deconstruct political stances themselves.

Filled with the nuanced beauty and complexity of the everyday-a pot of beans, a goat carcass, embroidered linens, a grandfather's cancer-A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying journeys through the inherited fear of creation and destruction. The histories of South Texas and its people unfold in Laurie Ann Guerrero's stirring language, including the dehumanization of men and its consequences on women and children. Guerrero's tongue becomes a palpable border, occupying those liminal spaces that both unite and divide, inviting readers to consider that which is known and unknown: the body. Guerrero explores not just the right, but the ability to speak and fight for oneself, one's children, one's community-in poems that testify how, too often, we fail to see the power reflected in the mirror.

Pity the Drowned Horses, winner of the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. Sheryl Luna's poems are about place, family and home within the broader context of the border as both a bridge and a barrier. The bilingual and bicultural city and how a place is longed for and viewed very differently as the observer changes and experiences other cultures.

Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Campos's winning collection, as "e;a work whose five parts trace a son's efforts-only partially successful-to fulfill his father's expectations and-perhaps even more difficult-understand those expectations enough to forgive them."e; The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his father's impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his father's expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man.

Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Echoing the collection's provocative title, final judge Edwin Torres writes: "e;Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolution-the poem's breath, the poet's body-passing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage."e; Privileging journey over destination, Zamora's poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things. Edwin Torres continues: "e;This is quietly revolutionary work. . . . A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement."e; With the publication of this volume, the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, now in its seventh edition, emphatically makes good on its aim to nurture the various paths that Latino/a poetry is taking in the twenty-first century.

Winner of the 2018 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.

"In Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes meditates on migration, and the American dream. He reminds us that Blackness is everywhere, persevering against erasure and violence. This collection is a satisfying and essential second book that leaves us excited for all that is to come from this poet." -Yesenia Montilla author of The Pink Box