Yaguareté White

The lyrical debut from Baez explores Paraguayan American identity. As Rigoberto González writes in the foreword, the collection seeks “to offer a more respectable consideration of Paraguay’s history, languages, and people from the point of view of someone who has experienced the country up close and who continues to visit—via memories and family stories—from far away.” The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois, a background whose complexity these poems animate. The motif of the jaguar allows English, Spanish, and Guaraní (a state-recognized Indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay) to meet, as in the opening poem: “No jaguars wander my father’s village, no panthers/ patrol the cane fields caged in bamboo fences,// nestled among the Ybyturuzú, what passes for a mountain/ range in Paraguay, the Cordillera Caaguazú.” Drawing a comparison to his mother’s heritage, the poet reflects, “And it’s true, no mountain lions roam my mother’s home-/ town of Erie, Pennsylvania, wasted city of industry, named for the native// people who once combed its shores, called “Nation du Chat”/ by the colonizing French, after the region’s Eastern Panther.” Baéz skillfully renders the complications of language and belonging. (Feb.)