Tomás Q. Morín

A contemporary dystopian elegy narrated by a cat imprisoned in a Schr dinger's box, by the prizing-winning poet and memoirist whose writing "cuts to the core with electrifying force" (The Free-Lance Star). The indelible cat heroine of this unexpected tale recalls her life with "the Mustache," her beloved owner. Trapped in a one-way mirrored box, displayed in a classroom for people who must contemplate her fate as part of their training to become "Emotional Support Humans," she weaves a self-soothing paean to the poetry, music, and creature comforts she shared with her Mustache--the best products of a society that has gone off the rails in its violence and intolerance. The trainees in the room, a motley crew our kitty describes with a novelistic flair of her own, are assigned to consider what they feel about her. They also argue about whether there's really a cat in there, or are they just being manipulated? Their daily required quizzes, reproduced in each chapter, are as poignant and witty as our narrator herself; meanwhile, the mystery of her cat-kidnapping is revealed to us, along with her potential next move on a more spectral plane. An elegy to freedom, dignity, and connection for all living beings, this slim novel engenders powerful feelings in the reader, as it shows us to ourselves from the other side of the mirror.

This fresh voice in American poetry wields lyric pleasure and well-honed insight against a cruel century that would kill us with a thousand cuts. "Mor n's writing uses the mundane details of everyday life...as a jumping-off point for creating fascinating and philosophical worlds." --LitHub"Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca" ("God squeezes, but He doesn't strangle")--the epigraph of Machete--sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there's an invisible hand at your throat. Tom s Mor n hails from the coastal plains of Texas, and explores a world where identity and place shift like that ever-changing shore. In these poems, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: "Whiteface" is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; "Duct Tape" lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself. One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Mor n considers our obsession with suffering--"the pain in which we trust"--and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have.

In this tender collection of letters to his son, Tom s Q. Mor n meditates on love, the body, and the future his son will have to face. He writes about the America his son will soon be born into, a country that will constantly question his place in it. An America that wields labels like Black, Brown, and white to make itself feel safe. An America in which Mexican American people continue to be seen as outsiders in their ancestral lands. Starting in New Jersey during a long-distance teaching position before his son's birth and spanning to the present day, Mor n shares his experiences with racism to sketch for his son ways to respond to bigotry that won't sacrifice his dignity or his spirit. He also challenges his young son, and the reader by extension, to reassess their perception of the world and the language we use to understand and label our surroundings. Hovering over Mor n's bold vision for shaking off the chains of injustice is a quartet of literary angels: Baldwin and Dostoevsky, Ellison and Camus. Where Are You From is a poignant and gripping testament that speaks to all the sons and daughters of America.

Winner of the 2023 Vulgar Genius Book Award Winner of the 2022 Writer's League of Texas Book Award Growing up in a small town in South Texas in the eighties and nineties, poverty, machismo, and drug addiction were everywhere for Tomás Q. Morín. He was around four or five years old when he first remembers his father cooking heroin, and he recalls many times he and his mother accompanied his father while he was on the hunt for more, Morín in the back seat keeping an eye out for unmarked cop cars, just as his father taught him. It was on one of these drives that, for the first time, he blinked in a way that evolution hadn’t intended.Let Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín’s compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness.

"I will call the voice of this poet a 'common' voice... a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing." --Philip Levine, PloughsharesThis second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tom s Q. Mor n explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices--of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing.From Patient ZeroLove is a worried, old heartdisease, as Son House once put it, the very stuffblues are made of, real blues that consist of a male and female, not monkey junklike the "Okra blues" or "Pay Day blues,"though I think House would agreetwo hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues, if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frogbitten in two by the neighbor's dog, all of whichmakes me wonder about the source of our diseaseand whose teeth first tore the heart after Adamand Eve left the garden?...Tom s Q. Mor n's debut poetry collection A Larger Country was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Selected from over 1000 manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Tom s Q. Mor n's debut, A Larger Country, is rich with the mastery of Mor n's lush storytelling. From war-torn images of Eastern Europe in the mid-1900s to modern-day glimpses of Mor n's home state of Texas, these poems are a bold and brightly imagined. Enthusiastically introduced by Thomas Sleigh.

"Tom s Mor n's poems are as infectious and spooky and darkly humorous as the Brothers Grimm, as shapely and colloquial and eloquent as John Donne, and as skeptical and addicted to history-as-fable as Zbigniew Herbert."--Tom Sleigh, from the introduction"An energetic and moving book of fantasias and elegies."--Edward HirschSelected from over one thousand manuscripts for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Tom s Q. Mor n's debut is rich with the mastery of Mor n's lush storytelling. From war-torn images of Eastern Europe in the mid-1900s to modern-day glimpses of the American southwest, these poems are bold and brightly imagined.From "Castrato": What do you call a gifted sopranowith no balls who is too uglyto play the heroine, is never tall enoughfor the role of the hero? Wait a quarter centuryand you can fast forward past the floggings, the endless sermons, the giggles under alderswith curious girls, busted noses, carpedsisters with chubby boys, the innumerablenights of sleeplessness. Better to skip all thisunpleasantness and descend the last risetoward the coast where you can stroll the docksin the short light of winter, get lostin the cloudbank, let the sea ripenin your hair, scan the flat waterfor the handsome young men . . .Tom s Q. Mor n was born in Texas and educated at Texas State University and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in San Marcos, Texas, and teaches at Texas State University.