“The Lesser Tragedy of Death is a brave and moving tribute to a brother gone astray. With skill, unflinching honesty, and redemptive compassion, Cristina García tracks his marvelous, complex, and errant life. As she acknowledges in the last poem of the book, she cannot save him, but she can bring the trumpet to her lips. These poems are the beautiful, painful, astonishing result of a journey to hell and back in search of the brother she loves. With this first book of poems, Cristina García, one of our best novelists and storytellers, proves herself to be a talented poet as well.”
— Julia Alvarez, author of Saving the World
“Cristina García has the courage to look tragedy in the eye without flinching. In a wrenching series of poems, The Lesser Tragedy of Death chronicles the life of the poet’s brother and his downward spiral into addiction, poverty, and crime, the vortex of self-destruction that threatens anyone who comes too close. In spare, luminous brushstrokes of language, García paints a series of portraits, from the boy who fell off a bicycle to the desperate mugger wrestling with an old woman over her purse. The cumulative effect is haunting, yet ultimately redemptive. There is power in García’s insistence that we see her brother as a human being, in all his complexity and mystery. You won’t forget these poems, or the story they tell.”
— Martín Espada, author of The Republic of Poetry
Excerpt
Twenty-Nine Palms
For years, I had an 8 x 10
of you in your dress blues.
It was the third time
Since you were six
That you’d worn a uniform:
That time after Catholic school,
And then at the military academy
In Pennsylvania, where you learned
How to kill and hotwire cars
And endure discipline.
How did you take to the
Cold-turkey methods for
Daily everything? Did they
Make you feel at home?
You in the nowhere desert
Fixing weekend caravans
To get laid in LA, racing
sixteen tequila shots.
Coño, men with buzz cuts
Give me the creeps. Enough
With the semper fi postcards.
Get the hell out, already!
Eventually, you did, on a
Dishonorable discharge, another
Story I’m too weary to tell. And you,
With a lit match between your fingers.