Cruel Fiction by Wendy Trevino
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Cruel Fiction brings together new material with celebrated work published here for the first time in book form, including the provocative and charged “Brazilian Is Not a Race,” a sonnet sequence meditating on race, nation, and history seen from the author’s native Rio Grande Valley. This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle though the insurgencies, context, and kinesis of our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.
WENDY TREVINO was born & raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She is a grant writer in San Francisco, where she shares an apartment with her boyfriend, friend, & two senior cats. She has published chapbooks with Perfect Lovers Press, Commune Editions, & Krupskaya Books. Her chapbook “#YourHarveyWeinstein” was published by Spoilsport Editions — an online press she started with the writer Oki Sogumi — in 2017. Cruel Fiction is her first full-length book of poetry. Wendy is not an experimental writer.
Excerpt
one thing i’ve learned / come to a provisional conclusion about:
when it comes to fighting, there are people who will help you
fight & there are people who will not & there are people
who will stand in the way. find the people who will help / be loud
& clear so they know where you are—focus on them, be encouraged
by them, encourage them, work with them. don’t worry
about the people who won’t help. they will be of no help even
if they are on your side. waste as little energy as possible
fighting people who stand in the way, which is to say don’t talk
don’t argue, just get them out of the way of the fight you came for.
tl;dr: you don’t need or want
the people who you know
aren’t “with you” to be
with you. really, you don’t
September 11, 2018
$16.00 | 978-1-934639-25-2
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“Wendy Trevino is my leader in craft. Cruel Fiction is my courage before a county judge. Born captive, I am inspired to at least take back my likeness. Against industrialists who know that in fire we are at home. One more poem could put the ghetto on the brink of irreversible rebellion. The continuum of slave fields will all know justice and Trevino has a proletariat story for every city this side of 2008.” — Tongo Eisen-Martin, California Book Award 2018
“Trevino’s valiant collection is a must read” — Poetry Foundation Book of the Year 2016, for “Brazilian Is Not a Race”
“Interweaving colonial and personal history, Wendy Trevino’s deceptively plainspoken poems carry readers back to an unsettled past where unity is not a precondition for concerted political action, but a product of it. Alert to such possibilities illuminated by an upsurge of radical social movements across the globe, these are wonderfully and militantly untimely poems.” — Chris Chen, The New Inquiry
