How To Love a Country

Generous and deeply felt, the long prose poems in this moving new collection from presidential inaugural poet Blanco (after Looking for the Gulf Motel) help us understand what it means to cross a border. But, more universally, Blanco shows us how the struggle for identity and the need to lay claim to a place in the world can't be separated, especially today. Blanco's talent is such that his struggle to feel at home in America, the country his family chose for him, is manifested on each page—sometimes writ large, as in "LET'S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT": "Let's recast every woman as a housewife, while and polite as Donna Reed always glowing on the kitchen set, again….—no lines about a career or rape, again." Or, more quietly, as in "AMERICAN WANDERSONG": "For my parents' exile from their blood-warm rain of Cuba to Madrid's frozen drizzle pinging rooftops the February afternoon I was born. A tiny brown and winkled blessing counter to such poverty that my first crib was an open drawer cushioned with towels in an apartment shared by four families. Such as my mother told me for years, kindling my imagination still burning to understand that slipping into being when my longing to belong first began."