José Antonio Rodríguez is the author of the poetry collections This American Autopsy, Backlit Hour, and The Shallow End of Sleep, and the memoir House Built on Ashes. He’s been awarded the Discovery Award from the Writers’ League of Texas, the Bob Bush Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and has been a finalist for the PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award and the Lambda Literary Award, among others. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, Nation, New Republic, and elsewhere. His work has also been included in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, The Norton Introduction to Literature, and A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025. He holds a PhD in English from Binghamton University and teaches writing and literary translation at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. His new collection of poetry is The Day’s Hard Edge.
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José Antonio Rodríguez
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The Day's Hard Edge
In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. "The Day's Hard Edge" is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.
