Querida - (Pitt Poetry) by Nathan Xavier Osorio (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize Finalist, 2025 California Book Awards Finalist, 2025 Norma Faber First Book Award

Querida offers a place-based lyrical meditation on the poet's immigrant parents, collective memory, language, and family in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles, California. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional reflections, imagistic portraits of people and places, and decolonial poetic rituals--braided with a crown of sonnets--a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism. Swaying between maximalist and carnivalesque textual decadence and sparse, brutalist, bilingual inquiries into language as yet another exploitative and extractive tool for control, these poems honor familial and community wisdom as the only way to survive the steadily destabilizing Capitalocene.

Review Quotes

"[a] rich, perceptive collection"-- "Cream City Review"

Poem by poem, the collection showcases Osorio's talents, the life he's grown into and the culture he breathes with every breath. This collection presents a version of the known world that feels new -- and it is beautiful.-- "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"

In his first book, Nathan Xavier Osorio doesn't think about immigration, family, and capitalism--he thinks through these subjects, imbuing them with a lyrical intelligence that refutes idealization and answers and isolation. Querida is a spectacular book that demands and rewards multiple readings.--Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

Memory is a guiding force in Nathan Osorio's stunning debut, Querida. From the opening, single-sentence tour-de-force of a poem to sonnet-sequences throughout, Osorio's formal agility and singular voice takes hold of our attention and never lets it go.--Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone

Nathan Xavier Osorio's Querida leads the reader through a series of hymns, songs, and prayers that give voice to the question of how we are formed by what we are born into. The mark of inheritance is presented, repeated, worked through, and returned to--as it is slowly absorbed into the body of the text. Inheritance is the very matter from which this exquisite debut collection derives.--Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion

About the Author

Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America's 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, the Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.