2024 National Book Award Longlist in Poetry In The Book of Wounded Sparrows , his second full-length collection of poetry, Octavio Quintanilla sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream. This is a book within a book, a memory within a memory, a future within a past, and most urgently—a journey to reclaim the self for what it was and to proclaim what it could be. Nested within one another, the English and Spanish, the poetry and art, create layers of obscuration and revelation, unburying the fractured landscapes left in the wake of geographic, emotional, and familial dislocation. In this collection, Quintanilla finds the language and the form to write about the loss that often happens when one migrates from one country to another: the loss of family, the loss of culture, and the loss of language. Of course, this book is more than that—more than a narrative of loss—it is a book of poetic reclamation, of poetic imagination, of finding new and interesting ways to tell a story, a love of language at its center, so as to reclaim a history of trauma and mythologize the self. “Octavio Quintanilla's The Book of Wounded Sparrows is simply a beautiful book, a lyrical journey within and through memory, language, identity, country, grief, family, and so much more. I'm particularly drawn to the gorgeous original artwork in the book—a combination of text and language, where mark-making begins to blend and interact with the mark-making of the poems. But mostly, I sense that this book is about absence and the ways in which the speaker tries to grapple with that absence, how to turn it, fill it, reshape it, draw it, but ultimately, the speaker knows silence can't be shaped, as Quintanilla writes: ‘My relationship with language is absence, / one I can't shape with my hands.’” — Victoria Chang -- Victoria Chang Published On: 2024-05-07 “In his long-awaited second collection of visual art and poetry, The Book of Wounded Sparrows , Octavio Quintanilla documents the tangled losses of migration by way of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border as a minor. Through finely cast poems whose lines cut and are cut as if with the thinnest of blades, Quintanilla tunes our witnessing to the loneliness and emotional costs of a child separated from his birth family, country, and tongue. To experience displacement at any age is to exist between languages, cultures, and familiars, and he captures this condition exquisitely: ‘You don’t know yet that a contraction is a visual form of separation: m    amá .’ To be of both is to also never be whole: ‘English is never enough. / Spanish is never enough.’ Quintanilla’s artwork splices the collection’s poem sections, and I’m struck by the process of reading text and art separately and together, allowing the interplay of the resonant ‘[d]istance between blood cells.’ This is a tenderly assembled book with hungers and thirsts I traced as if tracing my own.” — Diana Khoi Nguyen -- Diana Khoi Nguyen Published On: 2024-06-07 “ The Book of Wounded Sparrows is an exquisite cartography of countries both real and imagined that cannot be bridged by a solitary body. ‘Poetry remembers that distance can be made of suffering,’ Quintanilla writes, and so the narrator shatters himself into a hundred pieces—grieving boy, lost man, wounded sparrow and wild dog all at once—and tells us, ‘The sea forgives us / even if we don’t want to be / forgiven.’ Quintanilla understands that the work of the poet is to mourn, to remember, to pray, to dream, and beyond that, to collapse time and space and being, rendering ourselves whole, ‘I want to ask my wife to hold me, / hold me , I want to say, / until all my flesh burns off // and all that’s left is light .’” — ire’ne lara silva -- ire’ne lara silva Published On: 2024-05-07 “Octavio Quintanilla unites, with striking clarity and effortless cohesion, stanzas in search of things unbroken, a desire for lost plenitudes—ancestry, whereabouts, language—the poet’s personal archive of childhood letters, and his practice as an accomplished painter. In poems, paintings, and meditations on method, he animates each occasion with a distinct understanding of grid and coloration; with the volume and shadows that structure memory: ‘What word to pack a wound? / What wound to fill a mouth?’ This superb book fuses syllables and mark-making to match the two fires of affiliation, ever troubled by the complicity of one’s own name, and the cause of that unsparing eviction. ‘How many times have you dipped / your hand into the mirror / and tried to touch the last ripples / of what you are ceasing to be?’” — Roberto Tejada -- Roberto Tejada Published On: 2024-05-07 "With the declaration 'A Mother’s Day card is all I have to remind me / that, once, I was a child,' Octavio Quintanilla reveals the central trauma of his second full length collection, The Book of Wounded Sparrows . The speaker reflects on the aftermath of his immigration as a young child from Mexi