City Without Altar

The visceral and haunting debut from Dominican America poet Mendez interrogates the violence at the heart of the 1937 Haitian Massacre that took place along the Dominican-Haitian border during the Trujillo Era. Consisting of poems and a play-in-verse, Mendez’s work spans generations, inhabits voices, and reimagines primary source material to “hold and inherit” what has been lost because of unimaginable bloodshed. “To this day there is no memorial or marker on either side of the border that lists the names of the victims of the massacre,” Mendez writes, performing the work of witness required to serve as a kind of memorial. These pages offer “a memory of light,” a recounting of “limb and loss.” Woven through these vivid fragments of violence are moments of beauty (“tell me the color of the mountains/ across the river and how the wind breathes”) and moments of longing (“a part of me always searching for who/what we’ve left behind”). Mendez reckons with history that shapes the present, amplifying and reimagining a story that has long needed to be told. (Aug.)