Ancestral Throat by Danny Rivera

In Danny Rivera’s Ancestral Throat, the death of a father becomes the occasion for a series of powerful meditations on mortality, parenting, magic, spirituality, and diaspora. Rich in metaphor, the writing draws on the resonance of two languages, Spanish and English, for its music. More than simply remembering the past, Rivera’s work seeks to actively engage it in order to “reclaim our bloodborne history.” These urgent, often fragmented, lyrics make a place for uncomfortable silences, unexplainable gaps, the unspeakable, the unspoken, yet also for the explosive imperative “your mouth is a flare shot at dusk” commanding us to listen. And we want to keep listening. This stunning collection reminds us that the world is a strangely brutal and beautiful place.

–Elaine Equi, author of Sentences and Rain and The Intangibles

At one point in this brilliant collection, Danny Rivera writes: “Words loosen themselves/from meaning.” With an unerring eye, Rivera stitches and sutures meaning back into a language, following it down the mysterious and painful paths it takes through the body and through memory. Out of family history, ancient and recent, these poems braid the many voices of our ancestors into one powerful, haunting, indelible voice that revivifies the most human voice of all: the voice of blood.

–Gregory Crosby, author of Said No One Ever