Tracing the Horse

by Diana Marie Delgado, Luis Javier Rodriguez (Foreword by)

Overview

A New York Times "New & Noteworthy" Selection

Set in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Diana Marie Delgado’s debut poetry collection follows the coming-of-age of a young Mexican-American woman trying to make sense of who she is amidst a family and community weighted by violence and addiction. With bracing vulnerability, the collection chronicles the effects of her father’s drug use and her brother’s incarceration, asking the reader to consider reclamation and the power of the self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683872
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Series:	New Poets of America , #43
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Diana Marie Delgado’s debut poetry collection, Tracing the Horse, will be published by BOA Editions in the Fall of 2019. She is also the author of Late Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust (Center for Book Arts, 2015). She is a recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Letras Latinas, and Jack Jones Literary Retreat. Delgado holds a BA in Poetry from UC Riverside and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Ninth Letter, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Fourteen Hills. Her work is rooted in her experiences growing up in the Mexican-American community, and she is a member of the CantoMundo and Macondo writing communities. She is the Literary Director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Poet, novelist, journalist, activist, and critic Luis J. Rodriguez was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley of East Los Angeles. He served as the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles from 2014–2016. Rodriguez is recognized as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature, and has received numerous awards for his work. His best-known work, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, among others. Rodriguez has also founded or co-founded numerous organizations, including the Tía Chucha Press, which publishes the work of unknown writers, Tía Chucha's Centro Cultural, a San Fernando Valley cultural center, and the Chicago-based Youth Struggling for Survival, an organization for at-risk youth.

Table of Contents

Foreword Luis J. Rodriguez 7

§

Little Swan 11

They Chopped Down the Tree I Used to Lie Under and Count Stars With 12

House Where Wisteria Grew 14

Free Cheese and Butter 15

Twelve Trees 16

Before the Moon Tangles Your Hair 17

The Sea Is Farther Than Thought 18

Wolf (1) 20

House of Stars 21

Tracing the Horse 22

§

Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust 27

Desire Is a Road 29

Primos 30

Natural History 31

Bridge Called Water 32

In the Romantic Longhand of the Night 34

Prayer for What's in Me to Finally Come Out 35

The Kind of Light I Give Off Isn't Going to Last 36

Maria 37

Lucky You 38

Horses on the Radio 39

Some Guy I Liked Who Dated Strippers 40

Where I Drown 41

Notes for White Girls 42

Songs of Escape 43

Dream Obituary 46

§

Who Makes Love to Us After We Die 49

Juice 50

EI Scorpion 51

Firebird 52

Wolf (2) 53

Correspondence 54

Man of the House 55

Greenbriar Lane 56

Amiga 57

In the Starlight of an Arrest 58

Vecino Drive 59

The Playboy Lounge 60

Never Mind I'm Dead 62

La Puente 62

§

Acknowledgments 65

About the Author 67

Colophon 72

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Reading Diana Marie Delgado, I feel the bones she rattles, the blood currents she rides, the imagery and language that spiral up the crushed and diminished voices.”
—Luis J. Rodriguez, from the Foreword

“Multiversed, multivalenced, multivoiced verses where the point of view is singular and the vision, fractured and fractal. Enter this kaleidoscope of poems where ‘the Devil / can dance like a goddamn dream.’ Delgado's long anticipated and utterly unique first collection is a tour de force of luz y fuerza, cariño y claridad, signified and signifying: familiar as a folded tortilla, strange as an estranged father or the moon or ‘riding a horse I can't stop drawing.... / a song in a dream / whose words burn / my hands like light’ Read this book ‘for feelings’ in a world gone one-dimensional.”
—Lorna Dee Cervantes

“Diana Marie Delgado’s emotionally complex and beautifully rendered debut volume, Tracing the Horse, fiercely and poignantly explores the dynamics of a family fraught with violence and conflict. Chronicling her coming-of-age in La Puente, California, Delgado interweaves the tensions of poverty, sexism, casual cruelty, vulnerability, loneliness, and addiction with startling moments of unexpected beauty and fleeting grace. Her evocative poems unfold with a tensile energy, while being hauntingly revelatory.”
—Maurya Simon, author of The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems

Editorial Reviews

07/15/2019

Delgado’s stirring debut offers a ledger of the violence inflicted on female bodies within La Puente, located in the San Gabriel Valley of greater Los Angeles: “Men are the only islands/ I’ve ever lived on./ I’ll never get away.” “Now in the middle of my life,” she declares, “my journey is to forgive/ everything that’s happened.” Within Delgado’s poetics, forgiveness stems from the creation of beauty. As the book unfolds, Delgado situates the violent oppression of migrant women against a backdrop of the natural world; “The moon’s gone down again,” she explains in the title poem. Here, the speaker’s internal life is projected onto a desert landscape, as Delgado provocatively challenges the boundaries between interior and exterior, self and other, individual and collective. Despite its timely narrative arc and provocative political resonances, most of the work’s aesthetic choices rely on familiar images. “I rode through the stars,” she writes, “through streets where the wind talked to us./ Savage birds called out; I looked up and listened.” Some readers may wish for a more capacious definition of beauty than “birds,” “love,” and “the stars,” but Delgado’s vulnerable, deep exploration of the self is memorable. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

With vigorous wit and clarity, Diana Marie Delgado writes scenes of growing up in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. The poet traces the rich voice of identity through the turbulent passions of childhood and adolescence and their casually spoken, pungent lines that don’t ever go away. Here, amid the myriad complications of the first phase of life, addiction and incarceration of relatives are but details, not destinies. These starkly succinct poems and prose poems map a powerful constellation of becoming. As she writes in another poem from this collection — ‘my journey is to forgive/everything that’s happened.’”
—Naomi Shihab Nye for The New York Times Magazine

“ Within Delgado’s poetics, forgiveness stems from the creation of beauty. [She] provocatively challenges the boundaries between interior and exterior, self and other, individual and collective. Delgado’s vulnerable, deep exploration of the self is memorable.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In her debut poetry collection, Tracing the Horse, Diana Marie Delgado uses taut language and controlled recursion to render the life of her young narrator as she navigates the boundaries of her world in La Puente, a barrio in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley. The poems are ethereally beautiful—razor-sharp and dreamlike at once—as they explore the heavy realities and expectations of family, poverty, drugs, crime, and sexual exploitation. The poems gallop off from there, each title blooming into a memory, a whisper, a haunting—a horse in the night, flashing by lightning-fast. And you’ll read them lightning-fast, too, hungry for the magic of Delgado’s words.”
—GUERNICA

“Delgado’s first full-length poetry collection blooms in the barrio of La Puente in the San Gabriel Valley, and centers around a young woman and her family beset by addiction, incarceration, and other forms of violence. In one poem, the speaker wants to ‘understand why the light in my dad’s body / after the needle’s tucked in is orange / on a river so silver I can barely see him.’ In another poem that seeks to decipher her family’s troubled legend, the speaker considers the role her mother plays: ‘Maybe Mom’s the horse / because aren’t horses beautiful, / can’t they kill a man if spooked?’ A quiet sensuality underscores the domestic unrest, and Delgado’s understated lyrics read like snippets from a private conversation with an unknown interlocutor, one who shares her intimacy with both sides of the law: ‘California has a lot of prisons, all with beautiful names.’ An introspective carousel of electric, lightning lyrics.”
—Booklist

From the Publisher