Unaccompanied - Javier Zamora

\n \nEvery line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans.--Jamaal May\n \nZamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life. --Glappitnova\n \nJavier 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.\n \nThrough 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.\n \nFrom Let Me Try Again: \n \nHe knew we weren't Mexican. \nHe must've remembered his family \ncoming over the border, or the border \ncoming over them, because he drove us \nto the border and told us next time, rest \nat least five days, don't trust anyone calling \nthemselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines, \nAlhambra. He knew we would try again. \nAnd again--like everyone does.\n \nJavier 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.\n