The wait is over: BACKYARD MIGRATION ROUTE

I first read a selection of Emily Pérez’s poetry in 2006 in The New Hampshire Review—the online journal that discontinued publishing after putting out two decent issues. Shortly thereafter, we began to exchange the occasional e-mail.

We met for the first time over breakfast at an AWP conference. I wanted to meet Emily because I had also come across a piece of her critical prose—a book review not about poetry but about a work of experimental fiction. I so enjoyed her writing that I was hoping to enlist her as a contributor to Latino Poetry Review (LPR)

In the end, LPR was lucky enough to count on her incisive and balanced prose on poetry on four occasions:

HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.

On September 25, 2008, Emily Pérez graciously came out to Richard Hugo House to support “The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry ON TOUR.” And so after the reading Richard Blanco, Steven Cordova, Maria Melendez, Deborah Parédez and I shared a meal with her and a few others at a great Asian restaurant whose name now escapes me. That would have been the third stop in the seven-reading tour: here are some pics.

It’s a great pleasure to finally be able to hold in my hands a collection of her poetry. I describe Background Migration Route as a “compact family epic” that is also “story of mestizaje.”

Kazim Ali writes:

“Informed by sound, formed in the mind, Background Migration Route traces the landscape of the American West. Autobiography, geography, literary criticism and even mathematics weave together. School yourself with these far-ranging poems about growing up between languages and cultures.”

Order your copy today.

Emily Pérez grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She earned a BA at Stanford University and an MFA from the University of Houston where she worked as a poetry editor for Gulf Coast and a writer-in-residence with Writers in the Schools. She has been awarded scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and she recently joined the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She writes reviews for the Latino Poetry Review, and her poems have appeared in Borderlands, Third Coast, The Laurel Review, Ocho, Nimrod, DIAGRAM and other journals. She teaches high school in Seattle, Washington, where she lives with her husband and son.

BACKYARD MIGRATION ROUTE by Emily Pérez

Backyard Migration Route constructs an American consciousness through a series of delicately tuned lyrics. Hybridity and border crossing are not so much examined as created by these interlocking poems, which refuse to lock into a single culture, a single ethnicity, a fixed identity or a mapped landscape. The brilliance and complexity of this collection of "inbetweeness" lies in its deft ownership of a landscape’s history, a father’s anxiety, a culture’s racism, an unaccented name, just for starters.

—Claudia Rankine, author of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

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Informed by sound, formed in the mind, Backyard Migration Route traces the landscape of the American West. Autobiography, geography, literary criticism and even mathematics weave together. School yourself with these far-ranging poems about growing up between languages and cultures.

—Kazim Ali, author of The Far Mosque and Bright Felon

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"The burn must be my voice, the words / I cannot say." And so Emily Perez "writ[es] it all down" in what feels like a compact family epic. The vivid language, tightly woven, and the inventive use of rhyme make for a marriage of subject and form where ambivalence toward one’s "heritage" seems to be an undercurrent of tension—one where the poet "entwine[s] two parts of [a] nation." At its core, then, Backyard Migration Route is a story of mestizaje. That is, a quintessential American poem.



—Francisco Aragón, author of Puerta del Sol, editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry

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