Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut [Paperback]

Palm Frond with Its Throat Cutuses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time with a sense of compassion for the hard choices we must make to survive. Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.

Palm Frond with Its Throat Cutuses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time with a sense of compassion for the hard choices we must make to survive. Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.

“A chamber opera that Vértiz vivifies with jangle and sparkle.”—Library Journal

“Palm Frond With Its Throat Cutis an offering; to a people, to a city—but it is also an irreverent reclaiming of land and home for those who have always been here.”—Bitch Magazine

“Vértiz pays tribute to the fighters and the lovers inside each of us in this fearless and remarkable collection of poems that sings ‘about the dark times, about school. About how La Llorona needs a vacation from that riverbed.’”—NBC News

“In Vértiz’s poems, Latinxs living in California share “untranslatable” experiences that take place between English and Spanish. Her poems transform displacement l,