Description

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A powerful debut collection exploring one family’s pursuit of the American Dream

Sebastián H. Páramo renders a semi-autobiographical collection, utilizing self-portraiture and memory to uncover how his Texan, working-class, Mexican American identity shapes his relationship to his half brother and to his family’s burning desire to become American.

Portrait of Us Burning begins with the humble picture of an immigrant American family. This picture starts to disintegrate—and, ultimately, burns—with the need to understand an inciting event that haunts the family throughout the second half of the collection. As the poems gather force and the picture dissolves further, Páramo asks us again and again: What does it mean to burn while becoming a part of a whole?

About the Author

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SEBASTIÁN H. PÁRAMO has published poems in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and serves as poetry editor for Deep Vellum. He lives in Texas.

Praise For…

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Sebastián H. Páramo’s Portrait of Us Burning glows with possibility. The pyre is a rivalry between half-brothers for their father’s love, for belonging beyond divorce, for a future and a family that is not “anyone else’s life.” What I respect—as a poet and as a Chicana daughter—is the vulnerability it takes to confess that sometimes being born feels like a cosmic mistake. Páramo is asking for forgiveness without knowing from whom. What do we do when we feel indebted to the suffering our parents endured for not being white? For how they chose to love in gasps, in clutches—to make surviving desirable? Who do we become? Portrait of Us Burning sips at these questions. It is a pleasure and a relief to read what so many Chicanos rarely say. – Sara Borjas, author of Heart like a Window, Mouth like a Cliff