Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz as a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. He received his PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His writing has also appeared in Notre Dame Review, The Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Foundation. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. His debut full-length collection, Querida, was selected by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and is available now.
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Nathan Xavier Osorio
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Querida: Poems
"Querida" offers a place-based lyrical meditation on the poet’s immigrant parents, collective memory, language, and family in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles, California. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional reflections, imagistic portraits of people and places, and decolonial poetic rituals—braided with a crown of sonnets—a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism. Swaying between maximalist and carnivalesque textual decadence and sparse, brutalist, bilingual inquiries into language as yet another exploitative and extractive tool for control, these poems honor familial and community wisdom as the only way to survive the steadily destabilizing Capitalocene.
