In his landmark debut, Carlos AndrÉs GÓmez interrogates race, gender, sexuality, and violence to explore some of the most pressing issues of our time. These poems address the complexities and nuances of toxic masculinity, assimilation, homophobia, and the joy and anguish of trying to raise Black children in America. GÓmez casts an uncompromising eye toward both brutality and tenderness, going where we are most uncomfortable and lingering in moments of introspection that reveal fear, grief, or hatred. Birthed at a breaking point, these poems carve open silence, revealing fissures that welcome the light. Unflinching, poignant, and powerful, Fractures is both a gut punch and a balm.

Fractures (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Gómez, Carlos Andrés

Poetry

University of Wisconsin Press

Inspired by the award-winning poet and actor’s acclaimed one-man play, a powerful coming-of-age memoir that reimagines masculinity for the twenty-first-century male. Award-winning poet, actor, and writer Carlos Andrés Gómez is a supremely gifted storyteller with a captivating voice whose power resonates equally on the live stage and on the page. In one of his most moving spoken-word poems, Gómez recounts a confrontation he once had after accidentally bumping into another man at a club. Just as they were about to fight, Gómez experienced an unexplainable surge of emotion that made his eyes well up with tears. Everyone at the scene jumped back, as if crying, or showing vulnerability, was the most insane thing that Gómez could possibly have done. Like many men in our society, Gómez grew up believing that he had to be ready to fight at all times, treat women as objects, and close off his emotional self. It wasn’t until he discovered acting that he began to see the true cost of squelching one’s emotions—and how aggression dominates everything that young males are taught. Statistics on graduation rates, employment, and teen and young-adult suicide make it clear that the young males in our society are at a crisis point, but Gómez seeks to reverse these ominous trends by sharing the lessons that he has learned. Like Hill Harper’s Letters to a Young Brother, Man Up will be an agent for positive change, galvanizing men—but also mothers, girlfriends, wives, and sisters—to rethink and reimagine the way all men interact with women, deal with violence, handle fear, and express emotion.

Man Up: Cracking the Code of Modern Manhood

Self-Help

Motivational

Gotham

Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood

Self-Esteem

Penguin Publishing Group

Poetry. In HIJITO--selected by Eduardo C. Corral as winner of the 2018 Broken River Prize--Carlos Andrés Gómez writes of brutality and beauty with the same urgency and with a truth that burns readily; it is a collection of survival instincts. As a vital and tender exploration and deconstruction of contemporary society, his poetry engages with America's ever-changing landscape and the ways in which race, gender, and violence coalesce. Called "powerful, truthful, and sublime" by Cornel West, Gómez's words are a necessary paean to hope and courage in the modern world. "One loss makes you feel all the other losses, writes Carlos Andrés Gómez in this searing and inquisitive collection. His attentiveness to language and to pain is unflinching. Craft and empathy are inseparable; lyrical pleasures resonate with tenderness and sorrow. The poems pull something usable from // the wreckage of performative masculinity, police brutality, and displacement. And what's usable from misery? Gómez's deft control of language--the syntax is nimble, the diction is zoetic--brings us close to the boundless resilience that helps us survive, change."--Eduardo C. Corral "Gómez makes an impressive debut in this collection, singing of family, bullets, survival and smoke. This hijito is a tiny growl / at first / that blossomed / into a wail."--Tyehimba Jess, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry "Striking, searching, and serious. Carlos Andrés Gómez poems often leap landscapes beyond the West and ask us to consider the history we have been taught, how we speak it and carry it in our bodies. There is an earned depth and urgency to Gómez as a poet."--Raymond Antrobus, Rathbones Folio Prize winner

Hijito

Platypus Press

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