A Song of Dismantling

A culturally rich poetic history of generations. [Fernando Pérez] applies the meaning of lenguaje and vivid imagery to his poems that retell his family’s memories of their immigrant experience. Superstition Review

A Song of Dismantling is a marvelous debut.…Pérez knows that for us Latinx the personal has always been political. Indeed, the speaker’s abuelita, both curandera and familial warrior, will tell us how ‘she shared / her pillow with a rifle.’…These poems bring me hope that our ancestors remain with us as we struggle ever forward. I am grateful for this book. Jennifer Givhan, author of Landscape with Headless Mama

Fernando Pérez shows how we are sums of a past that both tethers and strangles us, that enriches as much as it drains.…Pérez’s poems are ballads that resurrect the violent passions and hungers that we need to feel whole. A Song of Dismantling is as beautiful as it is gut-wrenching. Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza: A Novel

These poems move fluidly through transnational spaces; Pérez carefully breaks apart—syllable by syllable—the stories we’ve been told and sutures them back together again, different. Images turn and turn again with freshness. Jane Wong, author of Overpour

The fragile opulence of Fernando Pérez’s first collection lyrically glides, processing absence…to transport the reader deep into the languageless horizons of exilic consciousness. J. Michael Martinez, author of Heredities: Poems