Bicycle in a Ransacked City

“This brilliant book tells a hell-forged truth with angelic music, making devastating beauty from the elemental and agonized relation between father and son—at once a war and a loss and a tether, a home. Through the cruel truth there is love; even in the deepest pit there’s light. This nocturnal-hearted poet’s not likely looking for it but there it is, still falling all over his burning, metallic, ruinous discoveries. There it is: love and brutality mixed together in epic scenes. No judgment, no transcendence—no way out of the mire. Cerpa’s is a magnificent talent—a yawp made for this very moment, and a voice for the ages.”
—Brenda Shaughnessy

“Confessionalism doesn’t have to be narcissistic: the lyric self can be an aperture. Cerpa’s lush debut enacts just such a vantage: the speaking self, always present, defers to the sometimes terrible splendors of a world it can never understand but only participate in. Cerpa’s governing register is Rilke by way of Staten Island. These are poems of rich participation, imbued not with worldliness but with an actual world.”
—G.C. Waldrep, author of Feast Gently

“The poetry of Andrés Cerpa gives startling dimension to the most profound experiences of human sadness; his words come from the ache of longing for what has been taken away or denied by loss and love. A remarkable and poignant debut that illuminates the dark rooms we all inhabit in our search for solace, beauty, or saving grace.”
—Rigoberto González