Eric Morales-Franceschini
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Tampa, Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is a former construction worker, U.S. Army veteran, and community college graduate who now holds a PhD in Rhetoric from UC, Berkeley and is Associate Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound, 2021), winner of the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation (University of Virginia Press, 2022), winner of the MLA’s 2023 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, and the 2023 Cultural Studies Association First Book Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson and Ford foundations, his essays and poetry have been published in a variety of scholarly and literary venues, including Global South Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Age of Revolutions, Small Axe, Acentos Review, Kweli, Muzzle, AGNI, and Boston Review. Syndrome is his debut full-length collection.
Selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Syndrome scrutinizes the rhetoric and naked power by which Puerto Rico became an “unincorporated territory” and its peoples pathologized subjects. That Puerto Rico is the world’s oldest colony and "Puerto Rican Syndrome" a (formerly) codified disorder cannot, after all, be taken lightly. Conjuring an ensemble of history, anecdotes, anthems, monuments, and statistics, this debut collection reckons with the collective traumas that haunt the Boricua psyche--a psyche vitiated by emancipatory desires as much as geopolitical travesties. In doing so, it strives to de-sublimate the effects of imperial power and enliven a politics for beauty and constituent power. Inventive, rigorous, and unyielding, Syndrome is nothing shy of a counter-diagnosis.
SYNDROME BY ÉRIC MORALES-FRANCESCHINI $20.00
I ask my mother why we left Puerto Rico and she says…
you don’t remember this / but my mother taught me / the story
about Atabey / she squat like a frog / birthed twins / left them
to fend for themselves / they ate yuca
and from their excrement / came the hibiscus / our flower
blood red / like the memory of loss / or to be exact / the undying
of a / radiant plentitude
so why not ask me / who cried / the day we left / because i can
only teach you / how to make your shadow small / when the sun
is ablaze / how to make yourself / a girasol / hungry for more
Ashes
— for Pedro Albizu Campos
I love the tenacity of a sky
that knows no end, host
to devilish kites and
lost temples; how it flouts
the sea, its salt a foil
to my wounds; I love, too
when hystory
absolves the righteous,
like legs that can
bear my weight,
or else say my name
in every tongue, except the
sovereign’s; for love is not
quiet, is not the stone that
becomes a cell, or a ballot
that drowns the moon; it is
the taramind tree, a walk
under its shade, its
unpretentious beauty &
proverbial wisdom
— the sweet sorrow, the
door that is a door,
the ashes that smolder.
Grito
— for Ramón Emeterio Betances
If only I were
quiet
like a sunset
emptied
of sunset
a soul
that longs
for
pageantry
&
thorn
crowns
— so docile
& heedless
quiet,
like a tame sky.
Oh, to be
that sky!