Tripas: Poems [Hardcover]

BRANDON SOM is the author of The Tribute Horse, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon. He lives on the unceded land of the Kumeyaay Nation and is an associate professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego.

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY

Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry

With Tripas, Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem’s ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of telephone between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise—one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale.

Poems that live in the intersection of Asian and Latine communitiesBrandon Som celebrates his Chinese and Mexican ancestries by amplifying not collision but coalition—a cultural partnership that’s existed in the Americas for generations, though seldomly encountered in poetry. At this vibrant intersection of language, ethnicity, and identity, inventive imagery is borne and so too a surprising lens that leaves us awestruck by Som’lÃ?