In Paul Hlava Ceballos’s Banana [] is a stunning debut full length collection that explored the crushing reality of the violence of “the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and memory.”
The title poem is part poetry and part reportage that traces the history of bananas in Latin America using only found text from sources such as history books, declassified CIA documents, and commercials. The book includes collage, Ecuadorian decimas, sonnets, and a long poem interspersed with photos and the author’s mother’s bilingual idioms. Traversing language and borders, global and personal histories, traditional and invented forms, this book guides us beyond survival to love.
The poems in Paul Hlava Ceballos’s banana [ ] are elegy, labor, and repair. The title poem is one of stripping away and accretion constructed from the words of others. It is made from racist emails, racist popular culture, from interviews, declarations, from reports that detail or obscure violence and living. An entire grammar emerges across the poem’s three sections.
-Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Order banana [ ] here.
His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker, Christina Sharpe, and Torkwase Dyson.
He has fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and the Poets House. He has been featured on the Poetry Magazine Podcast, Seattle’s the Stranger, and his work has been translated to Ukrainian. He currently lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography.
