In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself. Notably, this raucous collection also wrestles with Guaraní, a state-recognized Indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay. Guaraní both structures and punctures the book, surfacing in a sequence of jokes that double as poems, and introducing but leaving unresolved ambient questions about local histories of militarism, masculine bravado, and the outlook of the campos. Cutting across borders of every kind, Báez’s poems attempt to reconcile the incomplete, contradictory, and inconsistent experiences of a speaking self that resides between languages, nations, and generations. Yaguareté White is a lyrical exploration of Paraguayan American identity and what it means to see through a colored whiteness in all of its tangled contradictions.   “Báez skillfully renders the complications of language and belonging.”— Publishers Weekly “The end result leaves the reader with a deeper understanding of the experience of living between two cultures. An impressive first book.”— Booklist “Báez’s poems are lyrical fireworks, both awe-inspiring in their audacity and distinct in their genuineness and vulnerability.”— Chicago Review of Books “This is a valuable addition to contemporary Latinx poetry, introducing readers to a promising Paraguayan-American writer.”—Leo Boix, UK Morning Star “Moving through the ambiguities of language—English,Spanish, and Paraguay’s Indigenous Guaraní—the grin of a big cat shadowing his every unstealthy step through North and South American habitats and fixed ideas of manhood, Diego Baéz shows his discomfort to be a fascinating field of study.”— Foreword Reviews “What Diego Báez has accomplished in  Yaguarté White  is nothing short of remarkable. Heartfelt, heartbreaking, and humorous, Báez presents readers a world where it is okay to be curious and vulnerable, where it’s alright to undertake a journey to discover who we are and where we fit in."—Esteban Rodríguez, Tupelo Quarterly “In his stunning debut, the crossroads for Diego Báez in Yaguareté White is as much one of the physical Americas as it is linguistic: English, Spanish, and Guaraní converge, clash, and (re)connect through the elusive yet undeniable jaguar who symbolizes ‘the souls of all the dead.’ Despite diaspora and distance, the speaker tends to the dearly departed as well as the living of his mixed Paraguayan and U.S. roots. Through hard inherent truths—‘Everyone knows a man’s father / is the first dictator / he must suffer’—and witty takes on ‘basic white,’ nothing is spared from Báez’s exacting yet humorous eye. Through absurdist ‘Postcards’ from semesters abroad, Google searches, and Gallup polls that reveal a strange obsession with happiness and deference, the speaker unflinchingly reveals the horrors of colonialism and centuries of bloodshed and racism, but not without hope, for the Elusive itself returns to him: the miracle of the lyrical against it all—in the birth of his first child, in which ‘her breath first rounded into syllables, / sílabas into word and words into song.’ Culturally, critically perceptive yet deeply personal, this is a book you won’t be able to put down.”—Rosebud Ben-Oni, author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery “A poetry of not knowing: names, origins, where one belongs, how to explain the self to the self, how to explain the self to the other, how to explain to the self the mistranslations and dislocations of movement across languages, borders, hemispheres, and histories. Diego Báez’s Yaguareté White outlines through a brilliant arrangement and rearrangement of forms so many levels of colonial experience. Through a dissection of whiteness and race, indigeneity and empire, Báez brings us a vision of Paraguay that has yet to be seen in U.S. poetry. In the process, Yaguareté White —with its found text postcard poems, its ‘dirty language,’ its dictionary indexing of Paraguayan and national hierarchies—carves a new place in the poetry of the Americas. This is exciting and innovative work!”—Daniel Borzutzky, author of Lake Michigan   “In this startingly fresh debut collection, Diego Báez writes his Paraguayan American experience into and out of focus in smart, combustible poems that confront Latinx whiteness, diasporic return, family dynamics, militarism, and the politics of empire. Stealthily, the Indigenous Guaraní language un