These Spaceships Weren't Built for Us - by Alan Chazaro (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Chazaro transforms the ranfla, the hooptie, and the G-ride into a spaceship, a time machine. He points our gaze to the sky and we long to take flight while simultaneously holding onto our roots and what keeps our feet on the ground."--Joseph Rios, Fresno Poet Laureate and author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations

In These Spaceships Weren't Built For Us, Alan Chazaro launches a speculative, lyrical odyssey through Latinx identity, diaspora, and memory, where the immigrant experience becomes a poetic voyage, rooted in resistance, love, and the enduring pull of home.

In his newest poetry collection, These Spaceships Weren't Built For Us, Alan Chazaro reconsiders the possibilities of space travel as the son of Mexican immigrants while navigating daily life across rapidly shifting social spaces. From barren gas stations in Central California during the height of the pandemic to faraway jungle planets governed by paleteros, Chazaro imagines the present and future in ways that are simultaneously bleak and dire, hopeful and beautiful, and seemingly, impossibly unrealized.

Review Quotes

"This that late night backseat soundscape while the homie maintains the wheel. These Spaceships Weren't Built for Us is that wondrous ride with a last look in the rearview. Adjust the mirror. What do you see? "I don't mean to be so American, / but I am," Alan Chazaro writes as he traverses and meditates on the various borders of our lives. Follow the music. Lean into the bass. What do you feel? "There is a boneyard of buildings / inside my chest--" he proclaims. This is that voyage through all we've been framed by--be it bicycle spokes, eucalyptus roots, or collapse--the good, the bad, and the neon. I'm down for these poems, and down for Chazaro when he says, "What / is exploration without desperation?" Come thru, kick it. We're all here already."
--Michael Torres, author of An Incomplete List of Names

"Alan Chazaro is the bard of the Bay, the bard of the barrio. Like my late grandfather, Chazaro keeps time recalling cars and songs from the past. They mark time like tree rings. They unlock portals of memory like the vinyl ridges on a record. His poems create temporal shifts and catalog neighborhood histories from Oakland to Jackson Heights. The poems are laced with references just for the homies. They're shoutouts. With These Spaceships Weren't Built for Us, Chazaro transforms the ranfla, the hooptie, and the G-ride into a spaceship, a time machine. He points our gaze to the sky and we long to take flight while simultaneously holding onto our roots and what keeps our feet on the ground."
--Joseph Rios, Fresno Poet Laureate and author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations

"A poet, teacher, and journalist, Alan's writings reek of a well-traveled critical thinker who hasn't forgotten how to imagine a brighter future. In These Spaceships Weren't Built for Us, the Bay Area-bred wordsmith shows us where he's from, where he wants to go, and places no human has ever been. The running theme of space travel takes to a new perspective as it's painted by the words of a Mexican American man who loves lyrical hip-hop, culturally rich cuisine, and his family. The subject matter of Alan's writing--identity and immigration, reckoning with the past and trying to make a better tomorrow--speaks to the issues of today. And in this book, Alan makes it clear: those themes will continue to resonate as long as this spaceship we're flying through the cosmos, continues to operate this way."
--Pendarvis Harshaw, journalist and author of OG Told Me

"Alan Chazaro's latest collection These Spaceships Weren't Built for Us cannot be more timely and necessary as it generates important discussions with lines like 'I wonder how many borders are crossed without us ever knowing' and 'resistance is not letting anyone inside because resistance is a burning.' These Spaceships Weren't Built for Us honors the language of our abuelas remixed with the sounds from the Bay Area as we explore galaxies that can only be designed by Chazaro."
-Luivette Resto, Living on Islands Not Found on Maps

About the Author

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and Notes from the Eastern Span of the Bay Bridge (Ghost City Press, 2021). He is a graduate of June Jordan's Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and was selected as a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow at the University of San Francisco. A former high school teacher, he was raised by Mexican immigrants in the Bay Area and writes about the world. His work can be found in NPR, The Guardian, SLAM, GQ, L.A. Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Eater, and more. He currently lives in Veracruz, Mexico.