Synopses & Reviews
Javier Zamora’s debut assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level, and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that’s been left behind. Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses El Salvador and Mexico as families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and real life fuses with myth.
Review
"Zamora’s work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." Glappitnova
Review
"Although Javier Zamora was only 21 when he released his first acclaimed chapbook, the sophistication in these poems belies that fact. Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans." Jamaal May, Organic Weapons Arts
Review
"In [Nueve Años Immigrantes], he writes about living apart from his parents and then traveling alone over 4,000 miles across multiple borders to reunite with them as a nine-year-old. My students, Salvadoran in background or not, were amazed — they saw themselves and heard their families’ stories in these poems. Someone who looked and lived like them — young, immigrant, and undocumented — had written a book." Zócalo Public Square
Synopsis
New York Times Bestselling Author of Solito
"Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."--Jamaal May
"Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." --Glappitnova
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.
Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun."
From "Let Me Try Again"
He knew we weren't Mexican.
He must've remembered his family
coming over the border, or the border
coming over them, because he drove us
to the border and told us next time, rest
at least five days, don't trust anyone calling
themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines,
Alhambra. He knew we would try again.
And again--like everyone does.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Synopsis
This gorgeous debut speaks with heart-wrenching intimacy and first-hand experience to the hot-button political issues of immigration and border crossings.
About the Author
Javier Zamora is a rising star in the literary world of the Americas. He was born in the small El Salvadoran town of La Herradura and immigrated to the US at nine, joining his parents in California and growing up undocumented. Zamora earned his BA at UC Berkley and his MFA at NYU, where he studied with Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic. Zamora’s first chapbook Nueve Años Inmigrantes/Nine Immigrant Years engaged with history, borders, and memory, winning the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts contest. Since then, his poems have been featured in Best New Poets 2013, The Kenyon Review, PEN America, Poetry Magazine, and many others. He has already received many honors, including a N.E.A fellowship, the 2016 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner fellowship, among others. Zamora is part of the unofficial group, the Undocupoets, who work to promote undocumented writers and challenge the current status quo of publishing.