Joaquín Zihuatanejo is a brilliant poet. His testimonials and songs and explorations are multilingual, structurally adventurous. The wide range of forms and dictions makes visible his ravenous curiosity and intellect. His language, rippling with the loss of a father and racial and cultural tensions, resists one-dimensional answers. His nouns and verbs wonder, croon, weep, question, and roar. The deep attention to language and to the shaping of language infuses the work with a riveting self-awareness of the self — in this case, a Mexican American man unafraid to remember, to love. Beautifully crafted and richly imagined, Arsonist is a remarkable debut.
— Eduardo C. Corral Contest Judge, Author of Slow Lightning

Joaquín’s text is a shape-shifter of an existential “shivering,” yet, it is on fire. Lethal chemicals, let us say desires, abandonments, separations and industrialized lives without homelands, burn in their brutal severance. Here is a spilling and boiling caldron of zig-zag figures, of wild colors split from their root, “a son’s desperate attempt to / clear the air” — of things that long to congeal, yet, they smash into blanks, smoke and the questions of forgiveness and birth. Here, a relentless, piercing clarity, a precious text without trappings, an examination of loss and love. I salute Zihuatanejo for this blistering beauty among the ashes.
— Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States 2015-2017

Zihuatanejo brings us close, right to him, into the very thing one is made of: blood. Father. Mother. And it is not simple. He is fearless in his questions and the burning, searing death of letting go; all the more courageous in recovering the bright language left from that fire. What relief as Zihuatanejo faces absence head on, embraces then transmutes it. These poems glow in moving forms and elegant punctuation, yes, even the periods serve as marks of light. He writes, “my dead father / is not in the dirt, /nor is he in the poems — / he is in me. “ And I can feel—because I am shown — how absence, loss, conflict and contradictions are not to be feared, but with work, with line and word, become the very substance of self, a fiery wholeness. Beautiful.   — Layli LongSoldier