Selected by Kazim Ali as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, Thrown in the Throat "gloriously stakes new territory in queerness."

Finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2020
A Lambda Literary "Most Anticipated LGBTQ Book" of August 2020
Named a "Must-Read Poetry Collection" of August 2020 by The Millions

"Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages." And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon's butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when "because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes." Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country's long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with.

With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. "Sometimes even a diamond was once alive" writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says "has deadly superpowers." And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia's debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.

Author: Benjamin Garcia
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 08/11/2020
Series: National Poetry
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.3lbs
Size: 8.30h x 6.50w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781571315212


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 08/01/2020 pg. 72
Shelf Awareness 08/25/2020

About the Author
Benjamin Garcia's first collection of poems, Thrown in the Throat, was selected for the 2019 National Poetry Series by Kazim Ali. He is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow, was the 2017 Latinx Scholar at the Frost Place, and was a 2018 CantoMundo Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2018, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. Garcia received his MFA from Cornell University and currently works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in the Finger Lakes region of New York.