Machete with Tomás Morín & Lupe Mendez

Litquake's 2021 Festival runs from 10/7-10/23. Full schedule at litquake.org!
Co-presented by Texas Book Festival
“Dios aprieta, pero no ahorca” (“God squeezes, but He doesn’t strangle”)-the epigraph of Machete-sets the stage for a powerful poet who summons a variety of ways to endure life when there’s an invisible hand at your throat. In this new collection from Tomás Morín, culture crashes like waves and leaves behind Billie Holiday and the CIA, disco balls and Dante, the Bible and Jerry Maguire. They are long, lean, and dazzle in their telling: “Whiteface” is a list of instructions for people stopped by the police; “Duct Tape” lauds our domestic life from the point of view of the tape itself. One part Groucho Marx, one part Job, Morín considers our obsession with suffering-“the pain in which we trust”-and finds that the best answer to our predicament is sometimes anger, sometimes laughter, but always via the keen line between them that may be the sharpest weapon we have. In conversation with 2022 Texas Poet Laureate Lupe Mendez.