My Kill Adore Him: Andres Montoya Poetry Prize

"Like the poet's native Chicago, even when violent or troubling, Paul Martinez Pompa's poems risk beauty. His work possesses a fluidity that appears both effortless and well earned. His is a Chicago Renaissance of one--Gwendolyn Brooks's Bronzeville and Carl Sandburg's 'city of big shoulders' becoming a 'city of broken lovers' and 'an entire city in your ears' in Martinez Pompa's capable hands. Playful and political and passionate, the poems in My Kill Adore Him mark an important debut, one you'll surely adore." --Kevin Young, author of Dear Darkness and For the Confederate Dead
"This is an important book if we care about the lives of men, day-laborers, immigrants, factory workers and those on the urban fringe who don't get a fair shake. And this is an important book if we don't. Paul Martinez Pompa knows how to write; these poems vividly evoke people and lives that urge us toward awareness and honesty and compassion. Poetry can do no better than this." --Valerie Martinez, author of Each and Her and Absence, Luminescent.
"Paul Martinez Pompa deconstructs with a deft sword. Straddling literary strategies, no supposition nor paradigm is safe. He slays the stereotypic dragons within as well as without, putting popular culture, elegy, nightmare, personal narrative, identity and gender politics in the same hat, and drawing from the source, Pompa plays a poetic hand for keeps. Every turn of trope is more delightful than the last--a breakaway collection from an exciting new writer." --Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of Drive: The First Quartet
"This is one tough, smart poet. The poems of Paul Martinez Pompa are gritty and visceral, but never cross the line into sensationalism. They are poems that vividly evoke the urban world, especially Chicago, without ever lapsing into urban cliche. They are poems that seek justice for the Latino community without ever resorting to the overheated language that all too often consigns poetry of social conscience to oblivion." --Martin Espada, 2008 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize judge
My Kill Adore Him is a collection of poems from Andres Montoya Poetry Prize-winner Paul Martinez Pompa. With a unique, independent voice, Martinez Pompa interrogates masculinity, race, language, consumerism, and cultural identity in poems that honor los olvidados, the forgotten ones, who range from the usual suspects brutalized by police to factory workers poisoned by their environment, from the victim of a homophobic beating in the boys' bathroom to the body of Juan Doe at the Cook County Coroner's Office. Some of the poems rely on somber, at times brutal, imagery to articulate a political stance while others use sarcasm and irony to deconstruct political stances themselves.