On This Side of the Desert

Alfredo Aguilar

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781606354063
• eBook ISBN: 9781631014246
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia

Winner of the 2019 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

Natalie Diaz, judge

i say / my mother's name, / cristina & desert marigolds / crack through a boulder. / i say my father's name, martin / & all the novena candles / in the bed of the truck are aglow.

These lines from the book's titular poem "On This Side of the Desert" encapsulate the dominant themes of the collection: the power and meaning derived from the act of naming; the deep interconnectedness of Latinx cultures, a product of strong family traditions and an intimate relationship with the natural world; and a profound spirituality rooted in the sacraments of Catholic orthodoxy.

This poem, like many of those in Aguilar's collection is written from the perspective of a young boy growing up along the Mexican border. As Aguilar chronicles the unique challenges faced by border communities where surviving the desert is a perpetual struggle, and the distress of finding "an entire skeleton in torn clothes" is muted by frequency, he also modernizes the traditional pastoral form to encompass both beauty and trauma.

This debut book of poetry describes the experience of being raised in southern California as a child of Mexican immigrants in the shadow of the borderlands. Just as the borderlands are defined by the desert, so, too, are its inhabitants defined by their families, their culture shaped from the clay of the Sonoran desert and given life by the nourishing water of their ancestors. In these poems, the desert is recognized for what it truly is—a living, breathing body filled with both joy and pain.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• I Woke Up in the Wilderness
• When Born Wailing into the World
• Tonight Your Mother Is Running with Coyotes
• On This Side of the Desert
• On a Ranch My Father Broke Horses
• After Three Beers My Tía Talks about the Border
• My Mother Drove Us into Tijuana for Dentistry
• In the Second Month
• Borrando la Frontera
• My Mother Says Her Childhood Home Is Haunted
• When la Migra Caught My Father
• In Boyhood
• As a Child I Watch My Mother Sit in Limbo
• México-Tenochtitlán
• The Boy Considers Being Born Elsewhere
• Childhood Is a Realm
• The First Time I Went to the Cinema
• The Monsters My Parents Warned Me about Speak in Their Defense
• My Father Makes Me Hold a Hen
• Avowal
• Family History
• I Returned to the Altar
• Passing
• That Year
• Revision
• Yellow House
• Sueño
• Portrait of My Younger Brother with Birds
• I’m Told My Younger Siblings Look up to Me
• A Translation of the Word Corazón
• Mamá Chelo Stands at the Concrete Washboard
• Piecing Inheritance
• You Watch Your Father Leap
• Weld
• Through the Reeds
• Origin Myth