Recipient of the Academy of American Poet’s Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award.

“‘What danzirly poems!’ This is what I imagine the father in this book might say, using what he deems ‘the most glorious’ adjective ‘in the English language’ but in reality is a mishearing of the U.S. national anthem’s ‘dawn’s early.’ Nevertheless, this neologism, which the father applies to everything remarkable, describes perfectly a poetic language energized by what is simultaneously emergent and at the brink of extinction—when the speaker moves between origins and imagined futures, or a father denies his own immigrant hardship and cheerfully tells his daughter, ‘You are / American.’ This book is about interrogating the mold that shaped ‘the plastic / of my parents’ American dreams’ while worrying about its effects on the next generation, and it flips the script to show these molds’ destructive nature. The poems compose a fractured anthem that sings of connection and disconnection to place, identity, family, and language. To the tune of ‘you win, you lose, you win, you lose,’ this book’s anthem is ultimately about the immigrant’s struggle and desire to thrive, proclaiming proudly, ‘Por si las moscas, // we’re prepared / for anything.’”—Rosa Alcalá