National Book Award for Poetry longlist 2020

Corral is the child of Mexican immigrants and teaches at NC State.

The first part of this collection focuses on land immigration in the Southwest. Water stations, saguaros, smugglers, bodies in the desert. The second focuses more on life as a gay man.

It is unclear to me if Corral reported on actual events and then wrote poetry, or if he read articles and then wrote poetry, or if he interviewed participants, or based his work on photos, or used multiple sources. This is exactly why I classify "poetry" as neither fiction nor nonfiction. It's its own category.

Corral also uses overlapping text, Spanish and English text, and spacing to express different things--I couldn't always tell what, but sometimes could.

Like so much poetry by academics, this short collection required 2 pages of notes explaining references and so forth--I am sure there is a certain crowd that understands these as they read, and knows the sources, and thus understands the additional layer of meaning. I am not one of those people. ( )