A rich, accomplished, intensely intimate collection with 2 full sections of new poems bookending Blanco’s selections from his 5 previous volumes
“An engineer, poet, Cuban American . . . his poetry bridges cultures and languages—a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future—reflecting a nation that is hectic, colorful, and still becoming.”
—President Joe Biden, conferring the National Humanities Medal on Richard Blanco, 2023
“What a gift, this new gathering of poems from the singular Richard Blanco. A cause for rejoicing!”
—Krista Tippett, author of Being Wise and host of On Being
“Blanco’s poems are journeys to a homeland within the heart, a welcome homecoming earned from a lifetime’s wise voyaging.”
—Sandra Cisneros
“A triumphant anthem to a rich life in all its ages and awakenings.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye
In this collection of over 100 poems, Richard Blanco has carefully selected poems from his previous books that represent his evolution as a writer grappling with his identity, working to find and define “home,” and bookended them with new poems that address those issues from a fresh, more mature perspective, allowing him to approach surrendering the pain and urgency of his past explorations. Pausing at this pivotal moment in mid-career, Blanco reexamines his life-long quest to find his proverbial home and all that it encompasses: love, family, identity and ultimately art itself. In the closing section of the volume, he has come to understand and internalize the idea that “home” is not one place, not one thing, and lives both inside him and inside his art.
The poems range in form, voice, and setting, showcasing his command of craft, but in essence they are one continuous reflection on the existential question at the core of all of Blanco’s poetry: how can we find our place in the world. All are characterized by his keen eye, deep sensibility, and polished craft, without pretense. This volume is a gift to Blanco’s many readers but even more to those who have yet to discover that they can understand, and fall in love with poetry, that a poet can speak to them about his own and their own lives so profoundly, and that this poet, as Barack Obama discovered, can speak for all of us.
Richard Blanco has been justly celebrated for his poetic gifts and his command of the many forms poetry can take, from the finely structured to the prose poem formats. His previous volumes have been praised by Patricia Smith, Eileen Myles, Sandra Cisneros, Elizabeth Alexander, and many others. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and dozens of other publications.
“Tender and introspective. . . . An exceptional mid-career snapshot of a trailblazing poet’s remarkable journey.”
—Booklist
“Accessible and sincere, Blanco’s poems may sometimes play tag with unmasked sentiment, but they are equally capable of sharp commentary and a keen engagement with contemporary American life.”
—Library Journal
“What a gift, this new gathering of poems from the singular Richard Blanco. A cause for rejoicing!”
—Krista Tippett, author of Being Wise and host of On Being
“Blanco’s poems are journeys to a homeland within the heart, a welcome homecoming earned from a lifetime’s wise voyaging.”
—Sandra Cisneros
“Richard Blanco’s Homeland of My Body is a triumphant anthem to a rich life in all its ages and awakenings. ‘What should I do? / Every thing.’ These stunning new poems, astonishing in their generosity, cradle so many long-loved ones, that a full, new world is created—not broken into parts at all, but wholly realized, and utterly moving.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye
“A masterful poet who is clear-eyed and full of heart, Blanco explores the country’s haunted past while offering a bright hope for the future.”
—Ada Limón
“What I love about Blanco’s work is the lustiness of the poems; they have bodies, there’s such sensuality to the language, such flexibility to the line; and they display such delight in form, an unapologetic love for the world. He has become a poet who sings for all of us with the inclusivity and passion of a Whitman and the particularity and absorption in the quotidian of a William Carlos Williams, the street smarts of a Langston Hughes, the oratorical grandness of an MLK.”
—Julia Alvarez
“There is a uniting oneness to these passionate and remarkable poems, each finely wrought line a bridge from one heart to another, a love song of this burdened earth and all its flawed inhabitants. Richard Blanco is this century’s Walt Whitman.”
—Andre Dubus III
“Richard Blanco writes about the elusive poundingness of love.”
—Eileen Myles
“In these times of hate, we need poets who speak of love.”
—Martín Espada
Radiant Beings: New Poems Part 1
The Splintering
—playing god—
Why I Needed To
Until This: An Ekphrastic Ars Poetica
Questioning Villa Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
Radiant Beings: Photos by Joyce Tenneson
—anatomy of light—
To the Artist of the Invisible
Big Wood River
What You Didn’t Let Us Lose
Music in Our Hands
Visiting Elizabeth: A Glosa
What Governs Us
Maine Yet Miami
Upon a Time: Surfside, Miami
From City of a Hundred Fires
América
La Revolución at Antonio’s Mercado
Mango, Number 61
Shaving
Mother Picking Produce
The Silver Sands
324 Mendoza Avenue, #6
Havanasis
Varadero en Alba
El Jagua Resort
Found Letters from 1965: El Año de la Agricultura
El Cucubano
Décima Guajira
Palmita Mía
Palmita Mía
From Directions to the Beach of the Dead
Time as Art in the Eternal City
A Poet in Venice
We’re Not Going to Malta . . .
Somewhere to Paris
Torsos at the Louvre
After Barcelona, in Barcelona
Directions to the Beach of the Dead
Winter of the Volcanoes: Guatemala
Bargaining with a Goddess
Return from El Cerrado
Silent Family Clips
Papá’s Bridge
What’s Love Got to Do?
Visiting Metaphors at South Point
Translation for Mamá
The Perfect City Code
When I Was a Little Cuban Boy
Looking for Blackbirds, Hartford
How Can You Love New York?
No More Than This, Provincetown
Crossing Boston Harbor
Mexican Almuerzo in New England
where it begins—where it ends
From Looking for the Gulf Motel
Looking for The Gulf Motel
Betting on America
Taking My Cousin’s Photo at the Statue of Liberty
The Island Within
Practice Problem
El Florida Room
Afternoons as Endora
Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother
Maybe
Thicker Than Country
Killing Mark
Cooking with Mamá in Maine
My Father in My Hands
Since Unfinished
From How to Love a Country
Como Tú / Like You / Like Me
Complaint of El Río Grande
Leaving in the Rain: Limerick, Ireland
Island Body
Matters of the Sea
Mother Country
My Father in English
El Americano in the Mirror
Using Country in a Sentence
American Wandersong
Imaginary Exile
Let’s Remake America Great
Until We Could
between [another door]
One Pulse—One Poem
Seventeen Funerals
America the Beautiful, Again
What I Know of Country
And So We All Fall Down
Declaration of Inter-Dependence
Cloud Anthem
Here I Am: New Poems Part 2
Uncertain-Sea Principle
Seashore: An Ovillejo
Hineni
Weather of My Weathering
Life Without Rain
Thank You: For Not Letting Me Die
Bluejay Dialogue: An Ovillejo
The Cutting
Writing Home
For the Homeland of My Body
Become Me
Reverse Bucket List
Time Capsule
Living Will
Self to Self
Anti-Poem
A Good Day to Die
Moonrise
Say This Isn’t the End
Notes
Credits
Acknowledgments
- “Clack That Fan for These Pride Month Reads!” Beacon Broadside, included in Pride reading roundup
- “Congratulations to the 2024 Lammy Finalists!” Lambda Literary, book listed as a 2024 finalist
- “Poet Richard Blanco confronts questions of identity in his latest collection,” Portland Press Herald, review and write-up
- “Homeland of My Body: New & Selected Poems by Richard Blanco,” World Literature Today, write-up
- “Book Public: Richard Blanco on his new book, Homeland of My Body: New & Selected Poems,” Book Public/Texas Public Radio, podcast interview
- “Once upon a Time: Surfside, Miami,” Poetry Foundation, excerpt
- “Why I Needed To,” Poets.org, excerpt
- “Miami poet Richard Blanco finds belonging in Homeland of My Body,” WLRN, interview with arts reporter Tim Padgett
- “Ken Harmon Speaks with Poet Richard Blanco about His New Book, Homeland of My Body,” West Trade Review, interview
- “Why Maine poet Richard Blanco found himself teary-eyed at the White House,” News Center Maine with Rob Caldwell/NBC TV, interview
- “Poet Richard Blanco tells us how to read a poetry collection,” Boston Globe, Q&A
- “Fall 2023 Adult Announcements: Poetry,” Publishers Weekly, listed in Fall 2023 poetry roundup