Black / Maybe - by Roberto Garcia (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Poetry collection by Roberto Carlos Garcia. Explores themes of blackness and Dominican culture.

"I'm American, but I don't speak English because I'm from England and I'm a Latino that doesn't speak Spanish because I'm from Spain. I speak these languages thanks to a long history of colonialism, to be more specific, the losing end of colonialism. The flight attendant who poured my whiskey is a Spaniard. Spanish has been his national language for centuries and his family's language for generations. When he hears me, a mutt with African, Chinese, and Spanish blood (but who leans more towards the African), does he consider me a fraud? Does he see me as parroting Spanish? Now, this poor flight attendant is a fill in, of course, but you get the picture. What do most Spaniards think about the Spanish speakers in the colonies they lost all those years ago? Do they care? Why should I?" --from "Trapped in History," EnglishKillsReview.com

Review Quotes

"Garcia's black / Maybe is the new standard for American race work in the 21st century. Through bouncy and superbly rich elegies, odes and essays, Garcia decimates notions of monolithic blackness and/or Dominican culture with language that haunts, hopes and howls. Every piece in this collection tugs at tomorrow while fueling itself with crumbs of yesterday. Masterful writing looks and sounds like black / Maybe."

Kiese Laymon, author of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Long Division, and the forthcoming Heavy

"Roberto Carlos Garcia is, in his own words, an angry black man. Born of Castilian gypsies and Papa Africa, born of Trujillo's blood bath, the marked Dominican colonized, the worker's class, born American and city poor only to go incognito, a Suburban single-family latINO, he is a poet who refuses to lie or play nice, who refuses to be owned or named. black / Maybe is a brilliant mixed-self drama of historic proportions, complete with an intruding chorus of the wise and the dead. I hear a casting call to the culpable. I hear my own republic being sang."

Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation, Render An Apocalypse and American Purgatory

"García openly confronts racism: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, internalized, and intersectional; he calls for a healing, for a seeing of blackness as beautiful in the sun. In black / Maybe, García invokes the dramatic chorus to offer commentary on the complexities of Afro-Latinx identity. Through voces afrodescendietes, García engages in an experiential, existential, and historical hermeneutics. We are invited into the familiar spaces in which we learn and question who we are, where we are prodded to redefine ourselves outside of an amorphous whiteness. García reveals the bricks within us, that hide who we are, behind which we have only ourselves to meet// ourselves to beat, // only ourselves/ to eat."

Dr. Raina J. León, author of Profeta Without Refuge, Sombra Dis(locate), and Boogeyman Dawn