Description
Poetry that considers migration and identity through formal experimentation with sonnets.
José Felipe Alvergue’s en el norte/soy del sur, which translates to “in the north I am of the south,” is an exploration into the limits of the American sonnet, one that seeks to establish a stable sense of place, while opening vistas at each turn. Stitching together multiple sonnets into what he calls “sonnet essays,” Alvergue rides their turns—or “voltas”—that are guided by memories and photographs of his family’s migratory history between El Salvador and the United States.
The resulting text is a story of human geography that considers the coordinates of a long, continuous thought about what it means to be “of a place” as a defining characteristic of identity, when one is also “in a place” that sets strict limits on the political and historical potential of im/migrants. A deeply human documentary work that delves into one family’s migration across the hemisphere, en el norte/soy del sur hopes to give shape to the collective and often amorphous history of migration in the face of narratives that peddle spectacularized distillation and essentialism.
“I fear I can’t make/ myself small/ enough” writes José Felipe Alvergue in his haunting poetry collection, en el norte /soy del sur. This postnational, postmemory work traces the capillaries of generational trauma, how survival embeds itself into life’s tissues and choreography. For one Salvadoran family, migration to the United States morphs from hope to the realization that “the world is an emergency”. However, even among so much tragedy, there is always dancing and other miracles that refuse to be extinguished. “en el norte soy del sur” is a collection I will revisit again and again.
—Gustavo Barahona-López, author of Foundation
