Tripas
Subtitle
Poems
WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry
With "Tripas," Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem’s ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of “telephone” between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise―one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale.
Bio
Brandon Som graduated from Arizona State University with a BA in English in 1997.
Praise for this book
Family is the central unit in 'Tripas,' especially the poet’s Chicana grandmother and Chinese American grandfather and father. Their stories intertwine throughout the book, are are told in poems that are ambitious yet carefully wrought....Som weaves together disparate narrative and biographical strands into saga that feels both contemporary and timeless.
David Starkey California Review of Books
