Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems

(Hardback)

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A rich, accomplished, intensely intimate collection with two full sections of new poems bookending Blanco's selections from his five previous volumes "An engineer, poet, Cuban American...his poetry bridges cultures and languages-a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future-reflecting a nation that is hectic, colorful, and still becoming."-President Joe Biden, conferring the National Humanities Medal on Richard Blanco, 2023 In this collection of over 100 poems, Richard Blanco has carefully selected poems from his previous books that represent his evolution as a writer grappling with his identity, working to find and define "home," and bookended them with new poems that address those issues from a fresh, more mature perspective, allowing him to approach surrendering the pain and urgency of his past explorations. Pausing at this pivotal moment in mid-career, Blanco reexamines his life-long quest to find his proverbial home and all that it encompasses- love, family, identity and ultimately art itself. In the closing section of the volume, he has come to understand and internalize the idea that "home" is not one place, not one thing, and lives both inside him and inside his art. The poems range in form, voice, and setting, showcasing his command of craft, but in essence they are one continuous reflection on the existential question at the core of all of Blanco's poetry- how can we find our place in the world. All are characterized by his keen eye, deep sensibility, and polished craft, without pretense. This volume is a gift to Blanco's many readers but even more to those who have yet to discover that they can understand, and fall in love with poetry, that a poet can speak to them about his own and their own lives so profoundly, and that this poet, as Barack Obama discovered, can speak for all of us. Richard Blanco has been justly celebrated for his poetic gifts and his command of the many forms poetry can take, from the finely structured to the prose poem formats. His previous volumes have been praised by Patricia Smith, Eileen Myles, Sandra Cisneros, Elizabeth Alexander, and many others. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and dozens of other publications.

Reviews

What a gift, this new gathering of poems from the singular Richard Blanco. A cause for rejoicing!
Krista Tippett, author of Being Wise and host of On Being

Author Bio

Richard Blanco is the recent recipient of the National Humanities Medal. He has received awards for several of his books, including the poetry collections How To Love a County and Looking for The Gulf Motel, and memoirs For All of Us, One Today and The Prince of Los Cocuyos. He was selected by Barack Obama as the fifth presidential inaugural poet in US history, and his body of work and advocacy are characterized by his personal negotiation of cultural identity and universal themes of place and belonging. In 2022, he was named the inaugural poet laureate of Miami-Dade County. He was also named as the American Academy of Poets first-ever education ambassador. Connect with him online- richard-blanco.com, Twitter (rblancopoet), Facebook (RichardBlancoPoetry), and Instagram (poetrichardblanco).