Unaccompanied

August 21, 2017
Zamora details his experience emigrating from El Salvador to the U.S. at age nine in his timely and excellent debut, a heartbreaking account of leaving behind the grandmother who raised him to join parents he barely remembered. He offers harrowing descriptions of crossing the border without documentation—“not the promised land but barbwire and barbwire”—and inhabits the perspectives of family members, imagining, for example, how his father must have felt to leave behind his son and wife to cross the border alone. He also reflects vividly on his grandfather, a former gangster known for chasing his loved ones with a machete, and recalls the Salvadoran Civil War of the 1980s in affecting detail: in “Rooftop,” he remembers an aunt comforting him while bombs rained down nearby, and in “Aftermath” he writes, “See,/ little has changed. Burned thatch-roof, you can still stop rain.” He diagnoses his homeland’s ailments astutely (“Every day cops and gangsters pick at you/ with their metallic beaks, and presidents, guilty”), but the ache of homesickness remains: “lie to me. Say I can go back.” Zamora’s wistful ambivalence about his homeland and the difficulty of assimilating where one feels unwanted are both powerful and distressing.

September 1, 2017
Testifying to the tragedy unfolding on the southern border of the U.S., Zamora's debut collection expresses harrowing beauty and private heartbreak. His strong and compassionate poems of courage counter the noise and inaccuracies of political punditry and newspeak. Zamora has lived the experiences he writes about, most precisely in Prayer, in which a nine-year-old boy about to set out alone on a long, dangerous trek to the U.S., as the poet did, tells himself, I'm going to see my parents! Zamora contrasts a child's emphatic declaration with the unending consequences of imperialism, of racism, of oppression. The struggles of people seeking a better life in another land is not a matter of statistics or politics but of mothers and fathers, dreams and hopes, valor and risk. Zamora's poems bare truths that can be difficult to face, but they are necessary, artistically rendered, and memorable. If poetry can make a difference, this compelling volume by a promising new poet and Wallace Stegner Fellow is a powerful contribution.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)