Tag Sundress Publications

Ruin & Want cover reveal!

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

Happy to share the cover for my lyric memoir, Ruin & Want, forthcoming in November from Sundress Publications!

Book cover for Ruin & Want.

Super-excited to share this cover! Thank you to everyone at Sundress Publications for their work on this! Special thanks to Ani Araguz, my partner and artist behind the artwork on this cover. Here’s the original:

Art piece entitled “we go to sleep early so we can dream whats never in it for us.”

This piece is entitled “we go to sleep early so we can dream what’s never in it for us.” I love the sense of at once feeling mired and also breaking apart. This ties into the way ruining and becoming ruins because of want are used as a metaphor in the book.

Also, happy to share that the project has a description as well. Check it out:

Is selfhood constructed? And if so, by whom? Exploring queerness, race, body image, and family, Ruin & Want is a masterful meditation on otherness and identity. In a series of gripping, episodic prose pieces centered on an illicit relationship between a student and his high school English teacher, Araguz peels back the layers of his marginalized identity. By reflecting on his childhood into adulthood, Araguz grapples with finding a sense of self when early, predatory experiences have deeply affected his coming-of-age. In quixotic, deeply eviscerating lyric prose, Araguz delivers a troubling but bold memoir that handles this topic with courage while grieving what it costs survivors to reckon with harm’s aftermath. Yet in the midst of this struggle, we find many bittersweet and lingering gifts such as, “For the first time I saw myself as someone worth seeing,” that make this work necessary and unforgettable.

I’ve been working on R&W since 2016. The work has had me learning and growing over the years. The book is a testament to my survival. The final year of work had me realizing that I have been late in embracing my queer identity, something that has been difficult to do until the completion of this book. Still learning as I go.

Thank you to all who’ve read my work and supported! It means so much to be able to do this work and share with y’all. More soon!

Abrazos,

José 

writer feature: Amanda Galvan Huynh

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

This week I’d like to celebrate the debut poetry collection of stellar poet and friend, Amanda Galvan Huynh: Where My Umbilical Is Buried (Sundress Publications).

I’ve admired Galvan Huynh’s work on and off the page for some time now. She’s a committed Xicana educator as well as an editor, alongside Luisa A. Igloria, of the essay collection Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making :: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics.

I had a chance to read the collection and provide a blurb. Here’s what I wrote:

“From the title, Where My Umbilical Is Buried, Amanda Galvan Huynh invites readers to engage with the metaphor and image rich sensibility that drive the poems within. From the roads, nights, and fields where memory lies ‘buried’ under the sounds of voices whispering, Coke tab bracelets jangling, and cumbias, these poems grow and flourish into a lyric gift, an expression of affirmation and presence for gente y familia—the living, the dead, as well as who we must be in between.”

—José Angel Araguz, author of Rotura

To get a sense of the dynamic range of the collection, check out these two poems published originally in Up the Staircase.

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Copies of Where My Umbilical is Buried can be purchased from Sundress Publications.

To read more of Amanda Galvan Huynh, check out her website.