LETTERS TO THE POET FROM HIS BROTHER
Maceo Montoya
Maceo Montoya
NAMED ONE OF THE TOP TEN LATINO WRITERS TO WATCH (AND READ)!
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"[W]here does it all come from, Andrés? The images, the words?" Posed early on, the question unleashes a mestizaje-of-a-tome—that is: a book that marries words and image, prose and poem: a hybrid work of art as personal and vulnerable and moving as anything I've read in a long while. This is risky writing, maybe event counter-intuitive if one is preoccupied with forging a certain kind of "career." I couldn't stop reading, continuing to the end in one sitting. Maceo Montoya, the artist-writer, opens multiple fronts: dialogues with the living (father, art critic, lover); dialogues with the dead (beloved brother); indelible images from my native California--too often overlooked. But the exquisite prose poem narratives—unapologetic romanticismo in my view—are what completely won me over."
-Francisco Aragón |
Son to a painter, brother to a poet, how could Maceo Montoya not move in tandem to his family’s journeys? With this heartfelt self-portrait of an artist, Montoya honors his distinguished lineage by claiming an independent voice through language and imagery that matches the labors of the well-known Montoya legacy. That voice, limned with sorrow and loss, tells the personal stories that shaped the visions of a household of artists, including his own. But to that end, this touching book also celebrates community, how one man’s trek on the hard-won path to individuality led him back to the Chicano home, the birthplace of muse and music, narrative and lyric, where he invariably discovers that: “the great pain in my heart, the aching store of my creativity, has never been mine alone.”
-Rigoberto González |
$25 [+$4 shipping]
Proceeds from the first 300 books sold will be donated to the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative - a project of Letras Latinas,
the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Proceeds from the first 300 books sold will be donated to the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Initiative - a project of Letras Latinas,
the literary initiative at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
video by SacCentric Productions
Letters to the Poet from His Brother is hybrid memoir woven between essay, painting, drawing, and poem. A young artist probes his lineage of artists, poets, and cultural activists after the death of his brother, poet Andrés Montoya, and grapples with the cultural legacy of his pioneering Chicano artist father, Malaquias. As he attempts to craft himself into his own image, he questions the ideals of the solitary artist, contemporary Chicano art, the politics of place, and his own memory.
Traumatic loss starts him writing, painting. He pens letters to his dead brother full of doubt. He holes himself up in a room and tries to bring a lost love to life with paint and canvas and words. He reminisces about Elmira, Woodland, Boston, Mexico City, New York. He mocks himself. He contemplates the embodiment of the Chicano Movement in his father’s aging gestures and afternoon soccer matches in Knights Landing. He writes a book in which California’s overlooked agricultural landscape echoes off the ink. He paints images for you to read.
Set in a contemporary design broken up into four sections with series of paintings, or “plates,” capping each, the story strikes tension somewhere between official and intimate, confusing any distinction.
Hardbound, cloth cover
Includes ten removable artist prints
136pp
Traumatic loss starts him writing, painting. He pens letters to his dead brother full of doubt. He holes himself up in a room and tries to bring a lost love to life with paint and canvas and words. He reminisces about Elmira, Woodland, Boston, Mexico City, New York. He mocks himself. He contemplates the embodiment of the Chicano Movement in his father’s aging gestures and afternoon soccer matches in Knights Landing. He writes a book in which California’s overlooked agricultural landscape echoes off the ink. He paints images for you to read.
Set in a contemporary design broken up into four sections with series of paintings, or “plates,” capping each, the story strikes tension somewhere between official and intimate, confusing any distinction.
Hardbound, cloth cover
Includes ten removable artist prints
136pp
"This is a beautiful book. More than a celebration of the life and legacy of poet Andrés Montoya, these images, in text and drawings and paintings, give us a glimpse into the mind and heart of the artist who is Maceo Montoya, his obsessions, his fears, his loves, and the debt he has to the community that helped nurture him. A modern-day Goya, the works of Montoya can go from tributes to the tiny moments in the lives of ordinary people (people ordinarily ignored) to the tragedy of exploitation, from the light of day to the sadness of days. This is a true portrait of an artist as a young man, as a brother, a son, and a member of a rich artistic community."
-Daniel Chacon
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"Letters to the Poet From His Brother is a brave display of Maceo Montoya’s immense heart and singular brilliance. I wept while reading the letters between Maceo and his late brother, the poet Andrés Montoya, “a mean snarling giant who found salvation in a poet’s delicate labor.” I exalted in the revelatory narratives of the iconic Montoya family, the famed artists and writers. If there is a central voice where grace, art, writing, brotherhood, and loss converge so perfectly, it belongs to Maceo Montoya. The words “celebratory” and “triumphant” should not be used lightly, but somehow he has owned and redefined them in this gift of a book. Every poet, every artist, anyone who has experienced a tremendous loss - read this and be truly uplifted." -Lee Herrick |
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