Muscle Memory

Kyle Carrero Lopez's MUSCLE MEMORY covers money & work, Blackness & anti-blackness, the art world, queerness, & violence-governmental to interpersonal-as it swerves through its colorful landscape. Lopez interrogates the various complications of earthly living in a sharp, fresh voice, returning again & again to the musical core of his poetics. Afro-Cuban drumming & disco & Solange commune as these poems ping-pong between reverent softness and unsparing critique. Equal parts jovial and furious, this is a debut with teeth.

About the Author :
Kyle Carrero Lopez is a Cuban-American writer. He co-founded LEGACY, a production collective by and for Black queer artists. His work is published in numerous publications as well as anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets Volume IV: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Books, 2020) and Best of the Net. He holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU.

Review :
"Muscle Memory is reckoning, "live, marble homage", and indictment. No liberal hypocrisy, no joyful spark of resistance (joy, here, in the sense of deep transformation) is spared from its uncompromisingly abolitionist gaze. "you'll be made prop if you don't speak up", Kyle Carrero Lopez writes. In a stunning whirlwind of forms and registers, this book speaks with rhythm, wit, humour, and rigour. Muscle Memory demands action beyond the passive consumption of Black death, gives the violence of this time a name it can't escape." -Jody Chan "Kyle Carrero Lopez is a writer who brilliantly blends the experiential and the imaginative. The poems in Muscle Memory gripped my heart and wouldn't let go. As soon as I finished a poem, I began dreaming of when I would get to read it again. Lopez is a writer of enormous talent, and I will read anything he writes." -Clint Smith III, author of Counting Descent "Kyle Carrero Lopez's Muscle Memory is elastic. It crosses borders in flesh and mind, political and experimental, and codifies a personal realism. And this speaker journeys through lived imagery and music-rituals transfixed-remembrance." -Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Emperor of Water Clocks "What is muscle memory if not proof that we learn how to move through repetition? With humor & sincerity, Kyle Carrero Lopez looks at everything from the deployment of the acronym "POC" to fare evasion, while interrogating the effects of this process in Muscle Memory. For all that needs to be unlearned, some of these effects indicate learning with an eye to liberation. These poems situate a desire for what cannot be contained. As with Carrero Lopez's widely circulated poem "After Abolition," this collection looks to a future where all that keeps us from freedom is "knocked to sandcastle / ruin." -Wendy Trevino, author of Cruel Fiction "Pleasure is always getting in the way of terror. Tenderness is always threatening aggression. These poems understand that and dance and churn right on the brink between the world we desire and the world we inhabit. Kyle's syncretism gives his language a thrilling pulse and capacity for spontaneous self-inquiry-questions like is pettiness a small revolution? foreshadow an understanding of place, territory, and displacement, that could force us toward actual revolution. These are poems and sounds with personalities, not just attitudes, in a time where many are trying to leverage the fumes of attitudes in literature. Real style and care of this caliber is refreshing." -Harmony Holiday, author of A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom