How to Love a Country

April 1, 2019

Generous and deeply felt, the long prose poems in this moving new collection from presidential inaugural poet Blanco (after Looking for the Gulf Motel) help us understand what it means to cross a border. But, more universally, Blanco shows us how the struggle for identity and the need to lay claim to a place in the world can't be separated, especially today. Blanco's talent is such that his struggle to feel at home in America, the country his family chose for him, is manifested on each page--sometimes writ large, as in "LET'S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT": "Let's recast every woman as a housewife, while and polite as Donna Reed always glowing on the kitchen set, again....--no lines about a career or rape, again." Or, more quietly, as in "AMERICAN WANDERSONG": "For my parents' exile from their blood-warm rain of Cuba to Madrid's frozen drizzle pinging rooftops the February afternoon I was born. A tiny brown and winkled blessing counter to such poverty that my first crib was an open drawer cushioned with towels in an apartment shared by four families. Such as my mother told me for years, kindling my imagination still burning to understand that slipping into being when my longing to belong first began." VERDICT Submit to the fierce pleasure of Blanco's art.--Iris S. Rosenberg, New York

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2019
The second Inaugural poet for President Obama (the first was Elizabeth Alexander) and only the fifth in U.S. history, Blanco presents a fresh and significant collection shaped by and reverberating with his experiences as a young, gay Cuban immigrant in America. With Walt Whitman's everyman as a guiding storyteller, Blanco charts his own impressive journey, illuminating America's social topography along the way. To find out who he is," he charts who we are." And with each poetic step and breath, he finds the promise, the necessity, and the beauty of hope and a vision of what America can be. This clear-seeing and forthright volume marks Blanco as a major, deeply relevant poet. The book's stand-out poems include his much quoted Until We Could, a lyric about marriage equality; One Pulse?One Poem, about the Orlando nightclub shooting; and Remembering Boston Strong, about the Boston Marathon bombing. And years from now . . . / the tender roses you laid across / the finish line, the thankful praise you gave / for the lives that saved lives / . . . the brave / promises . . . filled with anthems sung by you like a thousand / songbirds at once. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)