Desgraciado
A collection of epistolary poems that exorcises and explores the material violence and generational trauma of colonization and systemic racism stored within queer Latinx memory.
In DESGRACIADO, Angel Dominguez navigates language and memory to illuminate the ongoing traumas of misremembered and missing histories and their lasting impacts. Dominguez unravels a critical and tender language of lived experience in letters addressed to their ancestral oppressor, Diego de Landa, (a Spanish friar who attempted to destroy the written Maya language in Mani Yucatán, on July 12th 1562), to articulate an old rage, dreaming of a futurity beyond the wreckage and ruin of the colonial imaginary. This collection doesn't seek to heal the incurable wound of colonization so much as attempt to re-articulate a language towards recuperation.
Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They now live amongst the Santa Cruz Mountains in Bonny Doon, CA. They’re the author of RoseSunWater and Black Lavender Milk. Their third book, DESGRACIADO (the collected letters) is forthcoming with Nightboat Books in 2022. Angel earned a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado. You can find Angel’s work online and in print in various publications. You can find Angel in the redwoods or ocean.