Winner of the Felix Pollak Prize (selected by Natasha Trethewey)  *  Winner of the Midwest Book Award for Poetry  *  Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in Poetry  *  Winner of the IAN Book of the Year Award for Poetry  *  Winner of the  Georgia Author of the Year Award  *  Winner of the  North American Book Award Gold Medal  *  Winner of the  Rubery International Book Award   Named a Best Book of 2020 by the UK's  The Morning Star .   In his landmark debut, Carlos Andrés Gómez interrogates race, gender, sexuality, and violence to explore some of the most pressing issues of our time. These poems address the complexities and nuances of toxic masculinity, assimilation, homophobia, and the joy and anguish of trying to raise Black children in America. Gómez casts an uncompromising eye toward both brutality and tenderness, going where we are most uncomfortable and lingering in moments of introspection that reveal fear, grief, or hatred. Birthed at a breaking point, these poems carve open silence, revealing fissures that welcome the light. Unflinching, poignant, and powerful, Fractures is both a gut punch and a balm. “ Fractures teaches us the past is always inflecting the present. In poems as charged as they are exquisitely made, Gómez offers us the chance to appreciate searching for ‘the exact day / [he] stopped dreaming in the language / that sings [his] name.’ But its true gift, its true power, is the way it transforms loss and sadness into something triumphant.”—C. Dale Young “Equal parts vision and prophecy . . . Devastatingly precise, full of aching desire for a complex past and nostalgia for the future yet to come. Gómez is writing with an urgency for the most pressing issues of our time. This is a voice that demands to be heard.”—Tina Chang, author of Hybrida “Gómez writes poems of unswerving conviction that also shine on the page, poems that emerge from the very nucleus of human experience. With compelling honesty and accuracy, he reveals the fissures of the mind and the heart. In articulate and masterfully written poems, he has given us a redemptive vision.”—Rodney Jones, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry finalist Gold Medal Winner in Poetry ― North American Book Awards Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet, actor, and speaker from New York City. He is the author of the poetry collection "Fractures" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), selected by Pulitzer Prize winner and 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2020 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and the memoir "Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood" (Penguin Random House, 2012). Winner of the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal and the International Book Award, Gómez has been published in The Nation, New England Review, The Yale Review, "Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), and elsewhere.   A star of HBO's "Def Poetry Jam," TV One's "Verses and Flow," and Spike Lee's #1 box office movie "Inside Man" with Denzel Washington, Carlos partnered with John Legend on Senior Orientation, a program to counteract bullying. He has delivered keynotes and recited his original work at more than 1,500 colleges, universities, independent schools, and companies in 47 U.S. states and 28 countries across six continents. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. The boy was done with being shadow, dust film on boot lip—wanted to be luminous. Sometimes a life splinters to break. To scatter. To be. —Excerpt from “Race was not a factor”