Cowboy Park

Eduardo MartInez-Leyva was born in El Paso, TX, to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, along with a teaching fellowship from Columbia University, where he earned his MFA. He was the writer-in-residence at St. Alban's School for Boys in Washington, DC, and teaches and resides in New York City.

I. Learning the Language Colorete ESL Lesson The Boy inside the Gun I Never Wanted to Speak Grief Workshop Lone Star Portrait of My Mother in Her Youth Son of a Gun Tormenta Composite Sketch I Was Only a Boy Portrait of Aging Father With Jesus in Our Mouths Portrait of My Mother Studying for Her Citizenship Exam Angelo Sin Documentos Don't Look Back, Little Halo Still Life with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Portrait of Angelo with his Possessions Confirmation Almost-Grief II. Scenes from the Bone Orchard Portrait of a Boy on the Other Side of a Glory Hole Small Vices Cowboy Park Vaquero Show Pony And God Punished Him for Being Disobedient God May Squeeze but Won't Strangle You Torero Mud Song Estrellita God Made Dirt, and Dirt Don't Hurt Tease Adultery God Gave You Hands, So Use Them Horseshoe Now You're Talking Ode to a Leather Harness Bracero with a Tattoo of the Virgin Mother Negation Litany for a Fallen God There is Little Left to Say About Harm Nostalgia Cruising III. When I Spoke the Language of Donkeys After the Shooting, You Have a Panic Attack In the Supermarket Portrait of an Absent Brother Mordida What's Above Us Is Either Dead or Still Dying Angelo Is Probably Dead A Protagonist Once Said Letters from a Younger Brother, Mourning Recuperado Portrait of Speaker inside a Burning House Broomtail Ballad The Simple Hour Cowboy Park Mustang Purgatory Portrait of the Speaker Riding a Greyhound Bus Notes Acknowledgments

"[An] exciting first book with cadence and verve. . . . The winner of the Felix Pollak Prize brings forth music in a book that catalogs aftermath through desire and mistranslation."-- "Poetry Northwest (Autumn 2024 Favorites)" "A remarkable collection. These poems are a form of compulsive repetition, and what they repeat is the desire for escape, through a language capable of doing so. Poetry as sublimation, poetry as a way out."--Cynthia Cruz "I am absolutely wowed by this book; each word, line, and stanza are invigoratingly precise. Marti?nez-Leyva is a poet who has done the painstaking work of craft, and he knows its power to deliver the reader to an often difficult, often spectacular reflection on survival. A beautiful, exacting, and triumphant collection."--Lynn Melnick "In this deeply felt, erotically charged debut, Eduardo Martinez-Leyva leads readers through a poet's carefully built interior world in which he braids together tenderness and violence, action and passivity, the unsayable with the sung. A rewarding, memorable book from an important new voice in American poetry."--Mark Wunderlich "The power of this book rests in an aesthetic swirl of cigarette smoke, cheap liquor, dust, salt, and sweat. Martinez-Leyva is unflinching, leaning into bitterness and beauty. Sometimes, a poet dares us to not look away."--Amaud Jamaul Johnson