An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry

The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous.

I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat.

I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning.

Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work.

What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich.

But I just nursed on this leather whip.

I just splattered my sheets with my sadness.

--from "Poem of My Humiliations"

"What is life but a cross / over rotten water?" Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. S nchez's powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border--the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. S nchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, S nchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.

Author: Erika L. S?nchez
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 07/11/2017
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781555977788


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/15/2017 pg. 87
Publishers Weekly 05/15/2017
Shelf Awareness 08/15/2017

About the Author
Erika L. Sánchez has won a "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Knopf Books for Young Readers. She lives in Chicago.