he says I deserve someone who will love me the way 

I love him. I want to kiss him, tell him love isn’t measured.

I squeeze his hand instead, afraid of the thought of anyone looking at us 

from the outside of my car.

—Excerpt from “Defying the Dangers of Being”

“The mouth, tongue, and hand feature prominently in Hernández’s collection. Indeed, these compelling poems kiss and bite, tell startling secrets and whisper with affection. They sometimes caress and sometimes strike. What he so eloquently calls ‘the language of grief’ pulses at the body’s intersection of language and desire, ethnicity and sexuality, vulnerable youth and empowered adulthood. What a stunning debut.”—Rigoberto González

“In this frank collection, Saúl Hernández documents grief alongside trauma, queer desire, and familial love; ‘sometimes to survive you have to transform,’ Hernández writes, and here we witness how one survives sexual abuse, the loss of beloveds, and various deaths within a family. Mathematics serves as a kind of water logic, a dream logic through which Hernández makes sense of his history: ‘a fraction to me means leaving traces of my culture behind, or how embarrassing it is to say—My parents are from Mexico, as in my parents are undocumented, as if to say they came here to give me a country that wants me dead.’ Juxtaposed with this math are explorations of the erotic border between violence and lust, vulnerability and tenderness. These poems course like lightning across the sky, illuminating both water and land below.”—Diana Khoi Nguyen

“Hernández wields surrealism as a weapon against displacement and alienation, or as he himself might say, ‘I learned how to kiss a man easy / when he held a gun to my neck.’ Through stark juxtapositions such as this, Hernández manages to honor the fact of his ancestry while bravely confronting the possibility of having been abandoned by ancestors. This is a brilliant debut.”—Jericho Brown