How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters

SaÚl HernÁndez is a queer writer from San Antonio, Texas, who was raised by undocumented parents and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He’s the winner of a Pleiades Prufer Poetry Prize, judged by Joy Priest; and a Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, chosen by Victoria Chang. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

“The mouth, tongue, and hand feature prominently in HernÁndez’s collection. Indeed, these compelling poems kiss and bite, tell startling secrets and whisper with affection. They sometimes caress and sometimes strike. What he so eloquently calls ‘the language of grief’ pulses at the body’s intersection of language and desire, ethnicity and sexuality, vulnerable youth and empowered adulthood. What a stunning debut.”—Rigoberto GonzÁlez “In this frank collection, SaÚl HernÁndez documents grief alongside trauma, queer desire, and familial love; ‘sometimes to survive you have to transform,’ HernÁndez writes, and here we witness how one survives sexual abuse, the loss of beloveds, and various deaths within a family. Mathematics serves as a kind of water logic, a dream logic through which HernÁndez makes sense of his history: ‘a fraction to me means leaving traces of my culture behind, or how embarrassing it is to say—My parents are from Mexico, as in my parents are undocumented, as if to say they came here to give me a country that wants me dead.’ Juxtaposed with this math are explorations of the erotic border between violence and lust, vulnerability and tenderness. These poems course like lightning across the sky, illuminating both water and land below.”—Diana Khoi Nguyen “HernÁndez wields surrealism as a weapon against displacement and alienation, or as he himself might say, ‘I learned how to kiss a man easy / when he held a gun to my neck.’ Through stark juxtapositions such as this, HernÁndez manages to honor the fact of his ancestry while bravely confronting the possibility of having been abandoned by ancestors. This is a brilliant debut.”—Jericho Brown

• In Another LifeFirst WaveThe Boy Who Lives in DreamsNotes on SueÑitosAmÁ Sees FirefliesCalamine13 Reasons Why ApÁ Fears WaterAt Night My Body WaitsChoo-ChooDefying the Dangers of BeingSecond WaveThe Boy y El Hombre Que se ComiÓ El RelÁmpagoDear IvÁnThat’s Not My NameWhen a Body Is DraggedTessellationLa DoppelgÄngerWhat Is a Cycle if Not a CircleFor My Queer AncestorsThird Wave The Boy & The Story of WaterMeditation on GriefNotes on Dividing FractionsPushing My Name Down Their BodiesMISSING TÍOHow to Outline a Body: Fragments after Tatarabuela Ignacia’s PassingWater Runs TooArs PoÉtica for a First G(ay)eneration Mexican AmericanThe Rio Grande SpeaksFourth WaveThe Boy & The Sound of HimselfThis Is Why I Fall FastThe Girl & The Northern LightsThe Loquat Trees & The Boy Next DoorAirballHow to Find the Distance between Two PointsMy Love Would Have Killed YouBreath Is a Body at WarFifth WaveThe Boy & The Lineage of DreamsWhen Dreams Come TrueIllusion of LightStrand of a MemoryThis Is How I FightThe Dance inside My AbuelaListening for SubmergenceHow to Kill a Goat & Other MonstersNotesAcknowledgments