(Dis)placement

(Dis)placement is a constellation of portraits of displaced people--immigrants, refugees, and their families--leaving their communities to cross the southern border of the United States. These poems have a dark and haunting light that emanates from each of their cores. They lift off the page and consume the reader in their deceptively neat line-lengths and rhythms, entrancing with every image. In (Dis)placement, Rodriguez explores the hazardous journeys across borders and landscapes many are forced to undertake when violence, destruction, and the constant fear of death are subjected upon a land and people. His language is evocative and lyrical, and challenges the reader to confront the reality of suffering, (Dis)placement unveils the harm inflicted upon bodies and terrains, and documents the will to survive in the face of hopelessness and loss. In the lineage of Eduardo Corral and Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Rodriguez depicts the border landscape with chilling atmosphere and the undeniable struggle of those attempting to cross it evokes deep empathy and horror at the injustices perpetrated against them.

Review :
"In Esteban Rodriguez's (Dis)placement, communal stories haunt many of these poems, while individuals are dismembered, or lost, or have their shadows severed from their backs. These transformations of diasporic bodies are violent, but Rodriguez rescues them from the lacuna of lost memories by collecting the traces of a journey, the expired prayers, the asterisks of bone. Through his imagination, he resurrects lives out of ruins, souls out of plastic bags, a voice out of the severed tongue of a snake. Fierce and achingly beautiful, I can't look away from every bone Rodriguez breaks open to reveal what the marrow confesses." --TRACI BRIMHALL, SAUDADE AND OUR LADY OF THE RUINS In Esteban Rodriguez's glorious collection, (Dis)placement, the reader is guided through a kind of contemporary Divine Comedy through cycles of hell and purgatory.Through ruin and death, corruption and sorrow, the poet guides the reader through an endless desert of crucifixions and war, a desert, both Biblical while, simultaneously, also the desert borderland of Mexico and the United States, all the while grappling with the eternal question: Where is God in a world like this? Or, as Rodriguez writes with startling beauty " wait...for God to riddle his wisdom in a dream." This collection, this series of poems, is a philosophical treatise disguised as a dream." Rodriquez has given us a collection of poems fixed in the terrible wound of reality, an important and necessary text. --CYNTHIA CRUZ, DREGS AND GLIMMERING ROOM