Bøger af Jason Magabo Perez

A new book-length elegy from San Diego's 2023-24 Poet LaureateJason Magabo Perez's second full-length book of poetry is an extended elegy set in the alleyways and Pacific-bound boulevards of San Diego, California during the current global health crisis. Called "an antidote to despair" (Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, The Swarm) and poetry that "complicates notions of solidarity, community and justice, distilling the quotidian into something sacred" (Rachelle Cruz, God's Will For Monsters), I ask about what falls away serves as an intimate grief manifesto against the daily violations of racial capitalism. Perez, the 2023-2024 San Diego Poet Laureate, employs a critical and improvisatory assemblage of lyric and litany, narrative and distillation, fragment and refrain to map city, solidarity and history. At once playful and tenacious, I ask about what falls away pays careful witness to working-class uncles, aunties, cousins and youth in rhythm with the anti-colonial wisdom of writers such as Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Aimé Césaire, remixing sorrow with a deep love and knowledge for everyday people.

THIS IS FOR THE MOSTLESS, writer and performer Jason Magabo Perez's debut book, is a lyrical collection of autobiographical poems, essays, fictions, and oral histories. Moving against discipline and genre, from city to city, barrio to barrio, these stories and sympathies are filled with familia and trauma, and cast with wildly divergent figures as iconic as Don Cheadle and Mandy Moore, and as obscure as Cobra Commander and Perez's own mother-a Filipina migrant nurse who in 1976 was framed by the FBI for murder. Ultimately, Perez celebrates and mourns the multiple migrations and afterlives of grandmothers, gangsters, girlfriends, superheroes, and poets. This book is about and most definitely for all of the mostless.