Books
B o o k s
Alan Pelaez Lopez is the author of the art and poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System), and the chapbook, to love and mourn in the age of displacement Nomadic Press).
Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (finalist: International Latino Book Award, 2020)
Published February 2020 | Visual Poetry
Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien is an experimental poetry collection that renders an intimate portrait of growing up undocumented in the United States. Through the use of collages, photographs, emails, and immigration forms, Alan Pelaez Lopez formulates theories of fugitivity that position the trans*Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession as root causes of undocumented immigration. Although themes of isolation and unbelonging are at the forefront of the book, the poet doesn’t see belonging to U.S. society as a liberatory practice. Instead, Pelaez Lopez urges readers to question their inheritance and acceptance of “settler rage, settler fear, and settler citizenship,” so that they can actively address their participation in everyday violence that often goes unnoticed.
**Poems from this book have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” as well as re-printed in Best American Experimental Writing.
BOOK REVIEWS:
- Michigan Quarterly Review by Marco Antonio Huerta Alardín
- The Los Angeles Review by Diego Báez
- Lambda Literary by Marrion Johnson
MEDIA:
- Publisher’s Weekly, “15 New and Forthcoming Indie Press Gems.”
- Kenyon Review, “Kenyon Review’s Summer Reading Recommendations.”
- Harvard Review, “These United States, Eight Books by Latinx Poets.”
- The Latinx Project @ New York University, “La Treintena: 30 Books of Latinx Poetry.”
- Montana Public Radio, “Alan Pelaez Lopez: ‘Poems From A Fugitive Alien.'”
to love and mourn in the age of displacement
Published January 2020 | Poetry
An elegy and a celebration, to love and mourn in the age of displacement by Alan Pelaez Lopez is an attempt to “make a / world anew” via the conjuring properties of poetry. Alan Pelaez Lopez reflects on what it means to embody a multidimensional existence as Black and Indigenous in an empire committed to maintain the global circuit of anti-Blackness paired with settler violence. By mediating death, fragmented romantic encounters, and the news, the collection insists/argues/declares that those who have survived (/are surviving) structural violence “create abundance where [one] thought there was none.”
MEDIA:?
- Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, “to love and mourn in the age of displacement: A Conversation with Alan Pelaez Lopez.”