Description

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Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either is a debut poetry collection which seeks Tejano pop star Selena Quintanilla as a means of reconnecting to the speaker’s cultural identity. As Spanish language and culture becomes more accessible to non-Latinx populations, the speaker grapples with her own complex story of assimilation. Modern marginalization, appropriation, tokenizing, and fetishizing are examined in this multi-generational memoir tracking a Latinx family’s journey to assimilation. This dynamic collection is far-reaching, exploring BIPOC experiences in predominantly white cultures.

from “Young Memoir”
 
di·as·po·ra
is silent. is spiritual. It is being robbed of memoir while you sleep in a suburb. it is nonconsensually sensual—it is a question. when it comes for you, what will you recover? what will you do to reclaim all that was forced lost?
 

About the Author

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MARISA TIRADO is a Latina poet from Chicago and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the founder of an international collective called Protest Through Poetry which provides seminars, publishing opportunities, and creative community for activist poets of color. Marisa has been selected for fellowships from Kenyon Review, Image Journal, and Macondo, and her work can be found in Triquarterly, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.

Praise For…

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"The sense of dissociation from one’s linguistic and cultural inheritance underpins this multifaceted chapbook, in which Tirado fuses personal heritage and colonial history in poems that often center around the amalgamated site of the speaker’s body. . . . Like bedrock outcroppings or New Mexican mesas, Tirado’s chapbook exists fully formed, yet promises further formations, deeper excavations of her poeticized self."
—Poetry Foundation's Harriet Books
— Diego Báez

"Tirado’s poems offer a visceral meditation on the emotional intersections of Latino identity, language and ethnicity. The poems’ nuanced experimentation with structure and wordplay is infused with expressions of doubt and strength that are seen only in the boldest of poets. . . . Tirado is a rising star in the world of poetry. Her work maps a new paradigm in American literature by exploring Latino identity from myriad perspectives."
—Forbes Advisor
— Horacio Sierra

"In a time when Latinx individuals are expected to perform authenticity as our cultures are increasingly commodified, we find in this collection a voice that revels in the freedom that comes from failing your 'purity exam.' Reader, Selena Didn’t Know Spanish Either is NOT the kind of book you can put down. Tirado’s lyric intensity will make you question the complicity and complexity of your own 'sonic culture,' And, if you’re like me—as you turn the cumbias up for the neighbors who sing along, and those who don’t—dare you to write it!"
—Benjamin Garcia, author of Thrown in the Throat
— Benjamin Garcia

"What’s language? Better yet, what’s a mother tongue? In this introspective, deeply engaging and pathos-filled debut collection, Marisa Tirado decouples the source of cultural identity with its representation and repetition, through words. Incorporating contemporary politics, existential questions, family, and place with questions of who says what and how they say it, Selena Didn’t Know Spanish Either is thoughtful, engaging and wide-ranging in its sincerity and recognition of the deeper roots of belonging."
—Tracie Morris, author of Hard Kore: Poems of Mythos and Place

 
— Tracie Morris

"[Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either] embodies the feelings of learning or re-learning a language by moving quickly through images that develop deeper meanings the more times a poem is read over. . . . In this chronicle of uprooting, discovery, and practice of her Spanish tongue, we witness the bravery one must stumble through to reclaim oneself in a threatening culture preoccupied with borders, grammars, and teaching the English tongue. I can’t think of a better poetry collection offering comfort, hope, heartache, and outrage for the last to know or the last to learn their ancestral tongue."
—Full Stop
— Amy Bobeda