The Boy Kingdom / El Reino de Los Varones - (Raised Voices) by Achy Obejas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month comes another brilliant bilingual poetry collection by Achy Obejas--a meditation on being a queer mom to two sons

These 44 prose poems, artful yet accessible, presented in both Spanish and English versions, immerse us in the boy kingdom that Achy Obejas inhabits with her two sons. They move from the wild and divine spirit of boyhood to the everyday rhythms of family life--mac'n'cheese, television, sick days home from school.

Achy carries multiple identities: she is Cuban American, lesbian, and Jewish. She captures the universality of motherhood while also illuminating the uniqueness of her queer, multilingual, multicultural family: the way her elder son looks as her as if she's "dancing with the dead" when she speaks Spanish; the way her boys prefer mac'n'cheese to tostones; the day her elder son comes home from school disquieted, then finally spills it: "A couple of boys yelled at him: Your moms are queer!"

The collection is divided into four parts. The first part focuses primarily on Achy's sons, and subsequent parts branch out into stories of her parents, her roots in Cuba, and her divorce.

Review Quotes

"Achy Obejas's prose poems in The Boy Kingdom are mind-boggling, unpredictable, heart-quaking. One of her dazzling acts of magic is to filter her sons' experiences through her own, so they mingle and coexist in the heart-gripping daily dramas of parenting amid divorce, death, immigration, and survival. Generously, she gives us twins of each of these lush, lyrical poems, so that the book is doubled--one rendition in English and one self-translated into Spanish. In this magnificent multilingual feat, both poignant versions are original love notes to her sons."
--Rachel Galvin, author of Uteropia

"This collection is a string of sapphires--a union of poems that are unyielding in their fierce honesty and transparent in their raw tenderness. Light flows through, reflecting a nuanced spectrum of the joy and challenge of navigating relationships with those we hold closely. She carves into the flesh and bone of our most intimate connections. Here motherhood is opened to reveal the sacred and raw challenge of how we must learn to navigate ourselves to guide our children. It interrogates the complexity of what we cherish and inspires us to pay attention to how love can both wound and fortify. It is a jewel."
--Emily Hooper Lansana, artistic director, SOL Collective: Storytelling by Women of Color

"Boys. They're irascible, a rain of needles. Snotty. Skinned shins, teeth always just a little wrong. But sons are different. Sons are shabby miracles. They bristle and bloom, and hurtle into their lives unfeared, yelping, head-first, and adamantly dragging their mamas' hearts with them. The Boy Kingdom, Achy Obejas's heart-bending familial lyric, is an unleashed outpouring of love for her two boys, as well as a reflection on the poet's place within a fervent lineage of women. Every word does work in these lean, muscular prose poems, each one unreeling like a snippet of cinema joining to tell one of our most traditionally elusive stories: the tenacious bond between mothers and sons, how it heaves and heaves toward breaking, how it never does."
--Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler

About the Author

Achy Obejas is a Cuban American writer, translator, and activist whose work focuses on personal and national identity. Her creative work has won two Lambda Awards and her journalism has won a shared Pulitzer Prize. A native of Havana, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.