Patient Zero

Tomás Q. Morín

Tomás Q. Morín’s Patient Zero is full of life and its undeniable hungers. Claws, fins, and feathers, hands, mouths, and skin betoken animals with appetites, our world—in which a man in a crowded market becomes a tree of butterflies, a mountain gives a feline yawn, grocery bags contain “milk for bones—salt for blood.” At the edge of the fantastic, realism beckons: the buzzard stalks the tortoise, and each beginning contains its end.
 
Patient Zero is about the end of love, yet Morín’s deadpan humor, love of language, and wild creativity remind us that both heartache and joy bring us to tears.

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ISBN: 9781556594939

Format: Paperback

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Saudades

When that word, one part swine,
one part evasion, first wobbled into my life
I was eating pastrami and hiding in my office
from students and I know Andrade was in the air,
as was the Samba, and how it’s almost impossible
to translate either one, nor should you
unless you’ve been a disciple of the rough grief
that lovingly wraps you in its wings, which is warmer
than one would expect, so much so that it’s easy
to forget for a moment something trivial like pigs
aren’t supposed to fly or that if you say “saudades”
with enough pain and heart the pigs of your past will come
trotting out of the dark, doing their little sideways dance
around you, shaking their hips to the drum
in your chest until you forget what a frown is
or why we need them and oh they will remind you
how delicious carnivale is, and how glorious
it is to make the past present, and how
easily one can sleep dressed in feathers. 

About the Author

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero. His debut poetry collection A Larger Country won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. He is co-editor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He is a writer-in-residence at Texas Tech University and teaches in the MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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“I will call the voice of this poet a ‘common’ voice… a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing.” —Philip Levine, Ploughshares