PLEASE PLACE ALL ORDERS FOR (DIS)PLACEMENT AT YOUR FAVORITE ONLINE RETAILER. WE SUGGEST BOOKSHOP.ORG WHICH YOU CAN REACH VIA THE BUTTON BELOW:

About (Dis)placement

In (Dis)placement, Rodríguez 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 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, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins

“In this glorious collection the reader is guided through a kind of contemporary Divine Comedy. Through ruin and death, corruption and sorrow, the poet guides the reader through an endless desert of crucifixions and war, a desert, 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? A philosophical treatise disguised as a dream. A collection of poems fixed in the terrible wound of reality, an important and necessary text.” 

—Cynthia Cruz, Dregs

“A concise ambitious book; self-possessed, provocative of thought, and attentive to line, sonic argument, and the stakes of history. Rodríguez pictures the brutal asymmetries of survival over the deserts of our geopolitical moment. Rendered in a borderland imagination confounded by what few have the language for are scenes of bedlam and exodus, danger and faith, ransom and inheritance. These “last days of my body” involve a territory of village elders, warfare, paramilitary death-dealing, and missing kin, but also promises of “light that breaks the clouds,” a recital of “moons and constellations,” the delirium of God, and the augury of actions that outlive us.”

 —Roberto Tejada, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness

About Esteban Rodriguez

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press, 2019) and the micro-chapbook Soledad (Ghost City Press, 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Shenandoah, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere with poems also featured as part of Poetry Daily. He is the Interviews Editor at the EcoTheo Review and is a regular reviews contributor at PANK and Heavy Feather Review. Rodríguez received his MFA from The University of Texas-Pan American and lives with his family in Austin, Texas where he also teaches.

Praise for Dusk & Dust

Dusk & Dust begins with the building of a home, a metaphor from which the book unravels a lasting picture of a childhood along the US-Mexico border. The reader finds themselves in multiple vessels that can “act” as homes: barbershops, circus, flea-market, a body, a mouth, butcher shop, fields, taxidermy, etc. What belongs inside and what belongs outside these containers is constantly getting blurred. The range is huge, and as Rodríguez says, “the world can be reduced to the smallest space and the most uncomplicated people.” But there is nothing uncomplicated or simple about this beautiful important debut that instructs that “breaking something, anything, is the quickest way to make it ours."

— Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied