Querida offers a place-based lyrical meditation on the poet’s immigrant parents, collective memory, language, and family in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles, California. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional reflections, imagistic portraits of people and places, and decolonial poetic rituals—braided with a crown of sonnets—a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism. Swaying between maximalist and carnivalesque textual decadence and sparse, brutalist, bilingual inquiries into language as yet another exploitative and extractive tool for control, these poems honor familial and community wisdom as the only way to survive the steadily destabilizing Capitalocene. 

Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, the Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.