By: LG Sebayan

Photo courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Press
Nathan Xavier Osorio’s award-winning debut poetry collection, Querida, looks at the lives of a family of immigrant origin in the San Fernando area of Los Angeles. Chosen by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, this collection published in September by University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the Pitt Poetry Series explores the family’s place in the American landscape. Osorio shows how family, inheritance, memory, and transnational culture fill in spaces left by cracks in the terrain.
The forty-three poems of this rich, perceptive collection are divided into three sections and include a one-sentence first poem, “English as a Second Language,” poems that are sequences of sonnets titled “The Last Town Before the Mojave,” poems in the form of cantos, and persona poems. Except for its beginning poem, “Abandonarium,” the third section comprises poems with titles that start with the word “Ritual.”
Osorio examines themes of ancestry, the past, Americana, such as the game of baseball, and the American lives of immigrant parents and their children. “Querida” — the Spanish feminine word for “dear” and a term of endearment — not only serves as the title of the collection, but also appears in epigraphs of the book’s second section, and in “Querida América,” a poem in the second section made up of seven quatrains and one final stanza of five lines, which addresses America directly and delves into the speaker’s and speaker’s mother’s attitudes toward the United States. “Querida América, I remember your promise / and put my lips to the gas tank … Querida América, / the last train home has left” (61). The poem alludes to loneliness and unfulfilled dreams in a violent, capitalist, and an exploitative America.
A variety of divisions in America’s landscape can be found throughout the collection. For example, in the powerful opening poem, “English as a Second Language,” the speaker is separated linguistically from others in an educational institution: “in my collegiate days when I nodded submissively to a professor / who assured me my failure was because English was my second language” (5). Additionally, this poem and others feature the San Gabriel Mountains as a border and separation, while other poems refer to valleys, rivers, or earthquakes. More splits feature in the poem, “13 More American Landscapes, / a View-Master Reel,” which is made up of thirteen short-lined lyrical vignettes separated by one hyphen, including “The Liberty Bell’s fissure”; divorced, multicultural famous couple whose names are even separated in the poem’s lineation, “Lucille Ball and the Latin Lover, / Desi Arnaz”; and “The U.S.-Mexican border wall / puncturing the Pacific” (58). The breaks and barriers represent unrealized American ideals.
The collection’s final Section III, which consists of the “Abandonarium” and “Ritual” poems, plays with the multiple meanings of the word “extraction” — the extracting process, a thing extracted, and ancestry. Some “Ritual” poems seamlessly traverse languages from English to Spanish. The poem, “Ritual for Erasure,” repeats “This extraction site is an omission,” which calls attention to what is extracted, missing, and why; one response is: “This extraction site is an omission of that which could, yet still cannot: / the bruised phantom limbs and the prayer passed from mother to / son” (83). The extractions, such as the “phantom limbs” and mother’s prayer, suggest spirituals that have not yet manifested and absences stemming from lineage.
Querida’s American landscape is one of contrasts: “Hot Cheeto bags” juxtapose with “hand-stitched servilletas” (13), there are “pigeons / or palomas” (39), and “the barrio’s first and last organic grocery store” (87). Osorio mends gaps from disconnectedness with family relations, transnational markers, heritage, memories, and faith.
Osorio’s Querida is published by University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bios:
Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, the Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.
LG Sebayan is a PhD English and Creative Writing student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where her work was selected by Nicky Beer for the Creative Writing Faculty Legacy Award for Poetry. Her poems are published or forthcoming in CALYX Journal, Midwest Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Editor at Cream City Review.