A poet’s debut essay collection exploring American faults through the eyes of a Dominican American

In Traveling Freely: Essays, Roberto Carlos Garcia explores intersecting topics such as race, identity, American socioeconomic inequality, police violence, our inability to partake in our culture as innocents, and our complicity as Americans in all that’s wrong with the United States from the author’s specific vantage point as a Black Dominican American man. The voice in these essays is both clear and nuanced, and as readers move through the collection, the various themes cohere into a multilayered investigation of institutional racism and the inherent exploitations of capitalism.

In essays that are uniquely straightforward and accessible, Garcia insists that in order to resist state-sanctioned violence against marginalized bodies and populations, we must understand our shared history of oppression—so that we can rise against it effectively and find new paths forward.

ROBERTO CARLOS GARCIA is the author of several books, including What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems, as well as the founder of Get Fresh Books Publishing, a literary nonprofit. The recipient of a 2023 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, he writes about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, NACLA, The Root, Poets & Writers, and the anthology BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, among others.