"[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."
- Francisco Aragón
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
- Francisco Aragón
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
