GUSTAVO HERNANDEZ is a poet from Southern California.
He is the author of the poetry collection
Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press)
&
the micro-chapbook Form His Arms (Ghost City Press)
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Never have faith in family and flora been so intimately grafted together than in Gustavo Hernandez’ debut collection, Flower Grand First. In the prayer of naming where one’s faith resides, a mother tells us “Think of a stem growing north and a bloom spreading: Chicago, Tejas, Arizona, California” and what becomes, in this collection, a jacaranda blossom or a morning glory, or the sister-cities of Jalisco and Santa Ana. Intertwined in these homegrown poems is what one mourns and praises when moving from one country to another: the body’s constant labor, the struggle to love and live free from fear, the landscape of language one learns to write an homage to familial history. These poems, as elegies, are the most tender renditions of loss. Line by line, they are sharpened with a profound love and longing that cut cenote-deep and offer us “a sprig of rue, an oregano leaf” in order to heal, in order “to hold on to everything we can still recognize.”
- Ángel García, author of Teeth Never Sleep
The sense of place and displacement — physically, mentally and spiritually — in Gustavo Hernandez’s debut collection is as thrilling as it is heartbreaking. The discombobulation of the immigrant experience, the awakening of sexuality in a strange land, the need to hold on and let go of traditions, and a family navigating the vagaries of the “American dream” can all be found in the masterfully rendered, elegiac poems of “Flower Grand First.”
- Collin Kelley, author of Midnight in a Perfect World
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