Description
death is a mariachi
Winner of the 2024 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
In death is a mariachi marcy rae henry’s speaker roams from New Orleans to New Delhi in death is a mariachi, a raw yet nuanced exploration of the shifting nature of identity, spirituality, and place. Reckoning with death through the lens of Buddhist ideology, the speaker technicolors her world: a blue-green whiptail lizard reproduces through parthenogenesis, golden oil glistens in petrichor, even the morphine in a grandmother’s IV takes on a kaleidoscopic sheen. Henry engages texts from 1970’s electronica to molcajetes and tejolotes this intersectional, eco-feminist exploration of the body and the soul, their limits, and their excesses. In her formally inventive and full-throated debut, Henry sings of the liminal, of the “soul separating from skin,” of words that are “useful as bones.” The speaker names what she sees and lets it go. She never tells anyone that she’s time travelling.
—Dorsey Craft, judge, May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
and author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions and Plunder
marcy rae henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist born and raised in the Borderlands. She has lived in Europe and Asia and had motorcycle accidents in Mexican America, Turkey and Nepal. She is the author of We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press), the body is where it all begins (Querencia Press), and dream life of night owls (Open Country Press). Her work appears or will appear in Salamander, Epiphany, PANK, The Southern Review, Worcester Review, Best New Poets and various other journals and has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, and first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest. marcy rae is an associate professor of English, literature and creative writing at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American Latino Studies Program and received Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award. She is a digital minimalist with no social media accounts and an associate editor for RHINO Poetry.
Praise for death is a mariachi
The poems in death is a mariachi are etchings scratched so deep the cave aches and even we tourists can feel it. The elements writhe forth, and feelings with them, and when we read “to Hell with forever” we say yes and listen for the poems to call us back. These poems call us back to ourselves in language and form by turns familiar and defamiliarized, as the world is and was and will be. With this text to illuminate our way, none of us need “light a cigarette just to have something burning.”’
—Marty McConnell is the author of when they say you can’t go home again,
what they mean is you were never there
death is a mariachi is bursting at the seams with an irrepressible curiosity for all things material-cultural, as well as cosmic. Marcy Rae Henry brilliantly works the quirk, wrestling every thought into precise lines, layering them into textures that play out like toccatas—intense, unpredictable, and singularly unique. The poems in this collection come with a fencing foil quickness, and are willing and able to cut up the facades of so many institutionalized aesthetics of our time. Ajúa!
—Rodrigo Toscano is the author of Cut Point
