The Palace [Paperback]

From Puerto Rico to mythological forests, The Palace charts a family's journey to build a life and home in a world that is often violent and rife with economic instability, as the speaker must also confront his own turbulent past and strive to imagine new ways forward.

Amidst real and imagined landscapes the narrator confronts the specters of his ancestors and ancient gods as the family traverses torn villas and labyrinths. Despite a turbulent history scarred by violence, disenfranchisement, and addiction, a path emerges toward redemption through the speaker's deep engagement with love and the natural world. Still, throughout the speaker grapples with his understanding of change: what can we, and what can't we expect to leave behind in life? What does it mean to move on, to grow?

Marked by solitude and inquisition, the poems ofThe Palacenote the physical nature of their existence as a vehicle for exploring the spiritual. Featuring recurring motifs of the labyrinth, addiction, fecundity, fragility, and future, Cerpa evokes the sense that one can move on from an environment or way of being in the world, but never from oneself.The Palaceis a testament of love and transformation, a journey toward splendor in a despairing world.

USAndrés Cerpais the author of two previous books of poetry,Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy(2019) andThe Vault(2021), which was longlisted for a National Book Award and celebrated as one of the best poetry books of 2021 byThe New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, his writing has appeared inPloughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Rumpus,and elsewhere. He is an educator and faculty member of the Randolph MFA Program.

Featured by Poets and Writers' "Page One"

"The Palaceimpressed me with a spare, luminous lyricism that delves into the spiritulã"