The Day’s Hard Edge: Poems

A radically open interrogation of queer Chicano identity

In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day’s Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.

JOSÉ ANTONIO RODRÍGUEZ is the author of the poetry collections This American Autopsy, Backlit Hour, and The Shallow End of Sleep and the memoir House Built on Ashes. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A Mexican immigrant and first-gen college graduate, he teaches writing at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.