IN PERSON - J. Estanislao Lopez - WE BORROWED GENTLENESS

Brazos Bookstore will be hosting J. Estanislao Lopez in person on Wednesday, November 9 at 6:30pm.

We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction--through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history.

The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope.

By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men--in the structures that they design and maintain.

J. Estanislao Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books). His poems have been featured in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, Poetry Daily, BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, The Slowdown Podcast, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in Houston.