Hardback : HK$208.00
WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry
With Tripas, Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem’s ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of “telephone” between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise—one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale.
WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry
With Tripas, Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem’s ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of “telephone” between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise—one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale.
Poems that live in the intersection of Asian and Latine communities
BRANDON SOM is the author of The Tribute Horse, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon. He lives on the unceded land of the Kumeyaay Nation and is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego.
Brandon Som celebrates his Chinese and Mexican ancestries by
amplifying not collision but coalition—a cultural partnership
that’s existed in the Americas for generations, though seldomly
encountered in poetry. At this vibrant intersection of language,
ethnicity, and identity, inventive imagery is borne and so too a
surprising lens that leaves us awestruck by Som’s rich poetic
landscape and multivalent story.
*author of To the Boy Who Was Night: New and Selected Poems*
In Brandon Som’s Tripas, a vision of the self is profoundly
contingent on portraits of others that manifest 'what’s passed
down, what’s recovered.' Som brings a consciousness of 'tenor &
rasp' to poems informed by family gossip and social history, one’s
place of origin and one’s place of immigrant footing, and the
textures of Chinese and Spanish. Saturated with exuberant language
and story, the poems in Tripas have the amplitude of archives and
the intimacy of songs.
*author of The Galleons*
'What is it we keep? What is obsolete?' Brandon Som’s Tripas shows
us the insides of conversations, family lineage, and technological
objects as a line in itself—everything connected—the wires, the
'piecework,' the harmonics of English, Spanish, and Chinese, and
the people in his family whose labor and language are tied and
inextricably linked to material and matter. As the daughter of a
microchips assembly line worker, I have been waiting for this book
from the grandson of a Motorola plant worker, and I see how these
poems are fragments that are not fractured, but found, heard,
recorded. Som’s poems are a ledger of love that shifts, traces,
extends that which telephones often do: split distance and cut
across time to bring us closer to what is created.
*author of Microchips for Millions*
Tripas is a beautiful book and a wondrous reading experience. It
transcends multiple borders, telling vivid family stories in
gorgeous lyrical language. Whether honoring his Chinese grandfather
or Chicana nana or other colorful characters—the poems flow
euphonically line to line, with fine phrasing and deep compassion.
. . . If personal is universal, this family portrait represents the
beauty and resiliency of our diverse and colorful human condition.
It augurs a spectacular world to come.
*author of A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected
Poems*
His grandfather’s arduous journey from Asia to the US, his
grandmother’s time in a microchip factory on the border, his
relatives’ work in barbers’, butchers’ and corner shops could form
the basis of a memoir, autobiographical novel or case study in
pan-American history. But so far Som has written none of these
things. Instead, he has built what he knows about his family’s
labours into two intricately patterned and formally inventive books
of poems.
*London Review of Books*
"Family is the central unit in Tripas, especially the poet’s
Chicana grandmother and Chinese American grandfather and father.
Their stories intertwine throughout the book, are are told in poems
that are ambitious yet carefully wrought. . . . Som weaves together
disparate narrative and biographical strands into saga that feels
both contemporary and timeless."
*California Review of Books*
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