Museum of the Americas (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780143133445)

Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry

Winner of the National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Cornelius Eady--an exploration in verse of imperial appropriation and Mexican American cultural identity

"Marvelous, argumentative, and curiosity-provoking" --The New York Times Book Review

The poems in J. Michael Martinez's third collection of poetry circle around how the perceived body comes to be coded with the trans-historical consequences of an imperial narrative. Engaging beautiful and otherworldly Mexican casta paintings, morbid photographic postcards depicting the bodies of dead Mexicans, the strange journey of the wood and cork leg of General Santa Anna, and Martinez's own family lineage, Museum of the Americas gives accounts of migrant bodies caught beneath, and fashioned under, a racializing aesthetic gaze. Martinez questions how "knowledge" of the body is organized through visual perception of that body, hypothesizing the corporeal as a repository of the human situation, a nexus of culture. Museum of the Americas' poetic revives and repurposes the persecuted ethnic body from the appropriations that render it an art object and, therefore, diposable.

Author: J. Michael Martinez
ISBN-10: 0143133446
ISBN-13: 9780143133445
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English
Published: 10/02/2018
Pages: 112
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.80w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 10/01/2018 pg. 11
Publishers Weekly 10/01/2018