At the Park on the Edge of the Country: Poems (The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize)

In At the Park on the Edge of the Country, Austin Araujo maps the intricacies of memory, immigration, and belonging through the experiences of one Mexican American family–his own–in the rural American South, crystallizing memory and self-knowledge as collaborative, multivocal affairs. Human and nonhuman voices and the competing landscapes of childhood and adulthood propel these poems, offering an unyielding portrait of a family’s endless encounters with the shortcomings of citizenship. Speakers sleep like tostadas, mistake hikers crossing a small river in Arkansas for a migrant father, and hold onto silence through difficult conversations in the fields and in the city. Revelatory and striking, these poems reinvent origin myths to unmask the contradictory and expansive astonishments of Mexican American identity in the twenty-first century.