The Book of Wounded Sparrows: Poems

by Octavio Quintanilla

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A laser-sharp collection about the American Dream, told in English and Spanish.

2024 National Book Award Longlist in Poetry

In The Book of Wounded Sparrows, his second full-length collection of poetry, Octavio Quintanilla sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream. This is a book within a book, a memory within a memory, a future within a past, and most urgently—a journey to reclaim the self for what it was and to proclaim what it could be. Nested within one another, the English and Spanish, the poetry and art, create layers of obscuration and revelation, unburying the fractured landscapes left in the wake of geographic, emotional, and familial dislocation.

In this collection, Quintanilla finds the language and the form to write about the loss that often happens when one migrates from one country to another: the loss of family, the loss of culture, and the loss of language. Of course, this book is more than that—more than a narrative of loss—it is a book of poetic reclamation, of poetic imagination, of finding new and interesting ways to tell a story, a love of language at its center, so as to reclaim a history of trauma and mythologize the self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680033663
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	09/01/2024
Series:	Con[text]ual
Edition description:	1
Pages:	122
Sales rank:	511,643
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and of The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024). He served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as The Southampton Review, Salamander,RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published in Poetry Northwest, Texas Review Press, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Midway Journal, The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and elsewhere.  His poetry and Frontextos can be found at the San Antonio Labor Plaza, and at Poet’s Point, a San Antonio community space.

Octavio’s visual work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, TX, El Paso Museum of Art, Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, TX. 

Octavio is the Founder and Director of the Literature and Arts Festival, VersoFrontera, and the Founder and Publisher of Alabrava Press. Octavio holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

Editorial Reviews

Octavio Quintanilla unites, with striking clarity and effortless cohesion, stanzas in search of things unbroken, a desire for lost plenitudes—ancestry, whereabouts, language—the poet’s personal archive of childhood letters, and his practice as an accomplished painter. In poems, paintings, and meditations on method, he animates each occasion with a distinct understanding of grid and coloration; with the volume and shadows that structure memory: ‘What word to pack a wound? / What wound to fill a mouth?’ This superb book fuses syllables and mark-making to match the two fires of affiliation, ever troubled by the complicity of one’s own name, and the cause of that unsparing eviction. ‘How many times have you dipped / your hand into the mirror / and tried to touch the last ripples / of what you are ceasing to be?’”
—Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada

In his long-awaited second collection of visual art and poetry, The Book of Wounded Sparrows, Octavio Quintanilla documents the tangled losses of migration by way of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as a minor. Through finely cast poems whose lines cut and are cut as if with the thinnest of blades, Quintanilla tunes our witnessing to the loneliness and emotional costs of a child separated from his birth family, country, and tongue. To experience displacement at any age is to exist between languages, cultures, and familiars, and he captures this condition exquisitely: ‘You don’t know yet that a contraction is a visual form of separation: m    amá.’ To be of both is to also never be whole: ‘English is never enough. / Spanish is never enough.’ Quintanilla’s artwork splices the collection’s poem sections, and I’m struck by the process of reading text and art separately and together, allowing the interplay of the resonant ‘[d]istance between blood cells.’ This is a tenderly assembled book with hungers and thirsts I traced as if tracing my own.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen

Diana Khoi Nguyen

Octavio Quintanilla's The Book of Wounded Sparrows is simply a beautiful book, a lyrical journey within and through memory, language, identity, country, grief, family, and so much more. I'm particularly drawn to the gorgeous original artwork in the book—a combination of text and language, where mark-making begins to blend and interact with the mark-making of the poems. But mostly, I sense that this book is about absence and the ways in which the speaker tries to grapple with that absence, how to turn it, fill it, reshape it, draw it, but ultimately, the speaker knows silence can't be shaped, as Quintanilla writes: ‘My relationship with language is absence, / one I can't shape with my hands.’”
—Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang

"Former Poet Laureate of San Antonio (2018-2020), author of If I Go Missing (Slough, 2014), and creator of a colorful series of visual poems, Frontextos (a blend of frontera and texto—border/text), Quintanilla returns with his second book, about which the author says: 'It has taken approximately ten years to say, in less than 100 pages, what I've been wanting to say since I first started writing in English.'"
—Diego Báez in Letras Latinas Blog

Letras Latinas - Diego Báez

The Book of Wounded Sparrows is an exquisite cartography of countries both real and imagined that cannot be bridged by a solitary body. ‘Poetry remembers that distance can be made of suffering,’ Quintanilla writes, and so the narrator shatters himself into a hundred pieces—grieving boy, lost man, wounded sparrow and wild dog all at once—and tells us, ‘The sea forgives us / even if we don’t want to be / forgiven.’ Quintanilla understands that the work of the poet is to mourn, to remember, to pray, to dream, and beyond that, to collapse time and space and being, rendering ourselves whole, ‘I want to ask my wife to hold me, / hold me, I want to say, / until all my flesh burnsoff // and all that’s left is light.’”
—ire’ne lara silva

ire’ne lara silva

Former Poet Laureate of San Antonio (2018–2020), author of If I Go Missing (Slough, 2014), and creator of a colorful series of visual poems, Frontextos (a blend of frontera and texto—border/text), Quintanilla returns with his second book, about which the author says: ‘It has taken approximately ten years to say, in less than 100 pages, what I’ve been wanting to say since I first started writing in English.’”—Diego Báez in Letras Latinas Blog

From the Publisher