Landfall

Landfall considers the arbitrariness of our attachments to both people and places, while at the same time marveling at the inevitability and necessity of those attachments. The importance of place in these poems, most prominently that of southern Louisiana, is pervasive, and the insistent description of landscape becomes inextricable from an interrogation of personal and familial relationships. The power of such bonds seems to defy any satisfactory explanation, but by drawing on personal narrative as well as on the natural world, these poems begin, cautiously and in fragments, to approach and confront that power.

The Ballad of Ravolo Soto

Set in 2008 Puerto Rico, this novel aims to explore the relationship between constructed masks of personal identity, the increasingly interconnected nature of community, and their confluence in the worlds of politics, media, social activism, and business through a narrative examination of the ways in which three primary characters affect the lives of those around them. Jaime, a meditative young man with a penchant for planes, comes home to find the power shut off and his drug-addict mother gone. His best friend, Yarique, a disaffected stoner with a false sense of machismo, becomes an overnight sensation after an escalating series of violent run-ins with his abuelo’s neighbor. Ravolo Soto, a reclusive pitorro distiller, drinks to keep The Other in check, but takes off into the jungles of Lares, hiding out in his father’s mountain shack, after a violent encounter with the police leaves one officer dead.