Winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
About the Author :
Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, the Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.
Review :
Embedded in place and lush with family, Querida offers an intimate vision of Southern California that fortifies and fractures people who live on a desert’s edge. Querida is both a book of endearments and an excoriation of the forces that pry resources—human and natural—from a difficult landscape with no thought to replenishment.
Poem by poem, the collection showcases Osorio’s talents, the life he’s grown into and the culture he breathes with every breath. This collection presents a version of the known world that feels new — and it is beautiful.
"[a] rich, perceptive collection"
Memory is a guiding force in Nathan Osorio’s stunning debut, Querida. From the opening, single-sentence tour-de-force of a poem to sonnet-sequences throughout, Osorio’s formal agility and singular voice takes hold of our attention and never lets it go.
In his first book, Nathan Xavier Osorio doesn’t think about immigration, family, and capitalism—he thinks through these subjects, imbuing them with a lyrical intelligence that refutes idealization and answers and isolation. Querida is a spectacular book that demands and rewards multiple readings.
Nathan Xavier Osorio’s Querida leads the reader through a series of hymns, songs, and prayers that give voice to the question of how we are formed by what we are born into. The mark of inheritance is presented, repeated, worked through, and returned to—as it is slowly absorbed into the body of the text. Inheritance is the very matter from which this exquisite debut collection derives.
