“These are the poems of a new fire. Raw fire makes a unique trail as it burns. They are fueled by a passionate, lyrical surrealism. This is a border politics kind of surrealism, emerging from a poetic sensibility in which there are no borders. This collection in essence embodies a fresh kind of creation story emerging from the Americas. It’s like reading Rimbaud for the first time. We are struck by an unabashed presence of a fearless singer.”
—Joy Harjo, judge
“Karankawa is memorable for a streaming imagery that carries us toward a shocking ancestral knowledge that is both intimate and a shout like the old song calling of the Apache. This work is so very strong in terms of the clarity of the messenger and an essential language like telegraph. This is an important and highly original collection of poems. A wonderful book!”
—Norman Dubie
“There is feast enough here in Rocha’s language, its sensuousness, its sass, its inventiveness, to delight any reader. These poems, rooted in the body and in Rocha’s Texas landscape, imaginatively explore the stories of our origins and the constant transformation of the self. ‘In your history, a tree is rebuilt,’ she writes. A compelling and memorable book.”
—Beckian Fritz Goldberg
“Karankawa is radically honest poetry, never beyond belief, its clarities and mysteries mutually deepening. In these diverse millennial visions arrive a fresh verse, and a vers, a “toward,” from far within. Harrowing revelations that begin then end with the body, brothers and fathers, transfiguring drag queens, broken friends, lost loves, all of us, here, now, creation’s numberless beginnings.”
—William Olsen
“Although grief becomes the prominent tone of her language, Rocha textures it with startling beauty, not as an apology for the sullen subject matter or even as a strategy for permission to write about it, but as an artistic flourish that presents mourning as a complicated experience, very hurricane-like—a devastating reality but also a transcendent one. ”
—Rigoberto González, The Rumpus
“This is the subject of Karankawa – opening one’s own cluttered history, who our parents were and were not, where we came from, what our childhoods meant, how we have been hurt, how we have been loved, and who we are when all of these things are taken into account. ”
—David Nilsen, Fourth & Sycamore
Karankawa named one of 2015 Latino Books: 8 Must-Reads from Indispensable Small Presses by NBC Latino
Karankawa named one of 23 Essential New Books by Latino Poets by the Los Angeles Times
Karankawa, winner of 2016 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry
Iliana Rocha 