ABOUT THIS BOOK

“There are fevers you still wish to forget,” writes Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, but how fortunate for the rest of us that he remembers. These tenderly crafted autobiographical poems pierce through to the heart of pain, love, loss, and the ongoing search for salvation—or at least a salve. Housed in the lived experiences of a queer Latinx person born and raised in the border town of El Paso, Cowboy Park seamlessly blends themes of masculinity, identity, and the immigrant experience, offering a new perspective on the iconic image of the cowboy and a deeper understanding of the complexities of human experience.

The detainment and deportation of Martínez-Leyva’s brother grounds this exquisite collection in the all-too-common familial tragedy of political violence and discrimination. Martínez-Leyva honors the people, language, culture, and traditions that shaped him, revealing the indignities, large and small, experienced by a community that is too often misrepresented and maligned. “My voice was the only thing keeping us warm,” he writes, and the warmth from this striking debut collection is beautiful to behold.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrants and earned his MFA from Columbia University. His work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He teaches and resides in New York City.

REVIEWS

“The power of this book rests in an aesthetic swirl of cigarette smoke, cheap liquor, dust, salt, and sweat. Martínez-Leyva is unflinching, leaning into bitterness and beauty. Sometimes, a poet dares us to not look away.”

— Amaud Jamaul Johnson

“I am absolutely wowed by this book; each word, line, and stanza are invigoratingly precise. Martínez-Leyva is a poet who has done the painstaking work of craft, and he knows its power to deliver the reader to an often difficult, often spectacular reflection on survival. A beautiful, exacting, and triumphant collection.”

— Lynn Melnick

“In this deeply felt, erotically charged debut, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva leads readers through a poet’s carefully built interior world in which he braids together tenderness and violence, action and passivity, the unsayable with the sung. A rewarding, memorable book from an important new voice in American poetry.”

— Mark Wunderlich

“A remarkable collection. These poems are a form of compulsive repetition, and what they repeat is the desire for escape, through a language capable of doing so. Poetry as sublimation, poetry as a way out.”

— Cynthia Cruz

“[An] exciting first book with cadence and verve. . . . The winner of the Felix Pollak Prize brings forth music in a book that catalogs aftermath through desire and mistranslation.”

— Poetry Northwest (Autumn 2024 Favorites)

TABLE OF CONTENTS