Tarta Americana

· Sold by Penguin
Ebook
144
Pages
Tools
Eligible

About this ebook

A suite of poems that channels the legendary singer-songwriter Ritchie Valens to examine and question mid-twentieth-century conceptions of race and art, identity and desire

Ragged and raging across the spectrums of cognition, race, and gender, Tarta Americana lyrically envisions forms of survival outside neuronormative perceptions and histories. Against the recent tide of white nationalism in the United States, Tarta Americana finds a rhinestone in Ritchie Valens, the rock and roll legend, surfacing across time and bodies, genders and sounds, displacing the linear unfolding of desire and biography. Valens, the embodiment of corporeal transcendence, guides Martinez as he expresses his own neurodiversity, his struggles and triumphs, interrogating memory, gender, and race, traversing pain in search of compassion and joy. Tarta Americana, tarred and glittering, melodic in its screams, overdrives text and space in chase of American politics that could, at last, harmonize love with redemption.
A suite of poems that channels the legendary singer-songwriter Ritchie Valens to examine and question mid-twentieth-century conceptions of race and art, identity and desire Ragged and raging across the spectrums of cognition, race, and gender, Tarta Americana lyrically envisions forms of surviva...

About the author

J. Michael Martinez is the author of three collections of poetry, including Heredities, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Museum of the Americas, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. He is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University.
J. Michael Martinez is the author of three collections of poetry, including Heredities, which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Museum of the Americas, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Awa...

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.