At Night My Body Waits

“Saúl Hernández's stunning book, At Night My Body Waits, contains multitudes. Hernández explores numerous themes such as grief, immigration, borders, the queer body, sexual abuse, politics, and much more. Put simply, the writing in this book is gorgeous: ‘Dreams run in my family. In mine I/nail water to the wall, it runs down//my hands and splashes at my feet...’ or ‘I take sleeping pills sometimes,//I become heavy enough to not dream.’ These poems rely on language to create tension, to express the difficult road of self-acceptance and freedom. This is a coming of age story, of heartbreak, of struggle, of identity, of border, and ultimately of empowerment.”

— Victoria Chang, Contest Judge and author of The Trees Witness Everything and Obit

“Defiance and vulnerability surge throughout Saúl Hernández’s magnificent poems. The family is both a site of tenderness and abuse. Queerness enlarges and isolates the self. Hernández’s attentiveness to disorienting proximities and to the bitterness of distance infuses his poems with agile and lyrical thinking. Such poems tear open the heart, such poems mend the heart.”

— Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning

“I'm drawn to this poet's endless affection for their grieving mother and the unrequited longing for their father in life and in death. Hernández offers beautifully painful reminders of all the places that grief resides. In his poems, it's small puffs of smoke or a song by the late Vicente Fernández. It's a river, a flood. We are swimming in mourning. The poems themselves are often water soaked dreams or sueñitos. The grief is in the walls at home and in hotel rooms where men steal away and bury their love in one another. It's in the carpets, and it's soaking our shoes. In all the ways that bring solace and injury, in the light and in the dark, cherish Hernández's  ability to render so  tenderly  the  lives of  Mexicanos  torn asunder by this life and so many borders. I'm looking forward to reading this poet for many years to come.”

— Joseph Rios, author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations

“At Night My Body Waits holds lightning at the tip of its tongue. What is the right move, these poems wonder, between countries of grief; between love and abuse; between dreams and reality? What can be collected between generations in a lightning field? Hernández’s speaker witnesses as well as enacts. They write to retrieve; they write to hold as much lightning as they can stand.”

— Yanyi, author of The Year of Blue Water