A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity
 
In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day's Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.

JOSÉ ANTONIO RODRÍGUEZ is the author of the poetry collections This American Autopsy, Backlit Hour, and The Shallow End of Sleep and the memoir House Built on Ashes. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A Mexican immigrant and first-gen college graduate, he teaches writing at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

“I’ve long admired José Antonio Rodríguez's writing, ever since Tia Chucha Press published his brilliant The Shallow End of Sleep. In this collection the intimate and hard truths of the borderlands surge with the singular revelatory rages of a queer brown man amidst the laments of a thousand forgotten souls. There is also love in the exquisite details, the surprising twists of language, the searing haunted lines.” —Luis J. Rodríguez, founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate— -

"José Antonio Rodríguez has done it once again—given us a poetry collection that sings through pain and arrives at wisdom. The Day's Hard Edge takes us along borders, not only the Texas/Mexico borderlands of the poet’s childhood, but to the borders between the living and the dead, between trauma and healing, and between magic and poetry. In poem after poem, you’ll feel the urgency of witness and Rodríguez’s expansion of verse, “one that transports you / To a corner of the soul you didn’t know was there.”  —Denise Duhamel, author of Second Stories: Poems— -

"There’s great darkness and pain within these pages, but also wonder and comfort." – Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

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