Reviews

Mexican Bird: Brown Wings Through White Clouds by Luis Lopez-Maldonado

prominent_v's review

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

addiesbookshelf_'s review

4.0

Mexican Bird is a powerful poetry collection that explores queerness and being Latinx in America and both the violence and beauty that comes with holding these identities. The poems are often visceral, dropping you into the body of the poet and the feelings and experiences they are going through. I highly recommend giving this poetry collection a read!

Thank you to NetGalley and Querencia Press for providing an e-arc of this book.

naomireadsworld's review

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.5

Mexican Bird: Brown Wings Through White Clouds is a poignant poetry collection by Luis Lopez-Maldonado. The author explores queer desire, dual identity as a Mexican and American, and resistance.

Lopez-Maldonado’s poetry is blunt, brutal, and achingly emotional, with poems that touch on experiences of drag, of racism and exclusion, of police violence and historical erasure. As a queer Mexican-American, I connected with the content and perspective of the collection, however, the technical rhythm of the poems did not always work for me.

The collection is worth picking up, containing poems that will continue to lovingly take up space in my head for the foreseeable future: “Day of the Dead: Orange County, California,” Battle of Puebla, 1862,” “Estrella.”

Thank you to Querencia Press and Netgalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

slaapkameractivist's review

dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

4.5

I got this poetry bundle as an arc on Netgalley. It will be coming out later this month. This was really good. I'm intrigued by the rhyming structure and it had a few sentences in there that made me lie the book down for a second to digest it, they were so good. Like with every poetry book, not every poem is my cup of tea but I liked 99%. The themes of race and queerness where so beautifully woven together. This had me feeling as raw as the sentences were. 4.5/5 stars.

ashliesydel's review

dark emotional funny inspiring lighthearted reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

 4.5 Stars

Raw, Emotional. Honest, Vivid

I fell in love with this author and this collection. He touched on so many feelings, societal expectations and hypocrisy, self-acceptance, anger, living your truth.