Sapello Son

Editors' Selection from the 2022 Frost Place Chapbook Competition

Fields of alfalfa turned into tufts of fire hazard from drought. The walls of a cold mobile home. A cut straw, stained ballcap, dirty carpets. These are the images that haunt Sapello Son, Alejandro Lucero's lyric rekindling of a childhood in New Mexico and the landscape that consumed his parents. Lucero's familiarity with the razor's edge of choices foisted on those at the fringes keeps us teetering between profound devotion to family and sober recognition of the ways some families fail. Like its namesake, Sapello Son avoids sentimentality and refuses sympathy, asking us to reckon with the only things we're born with: a place, a family, and a name.