At the Bottom of the Sea with One Light
Winner of the 25th A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Alejandro Lucero's debut collection, At the Bottom of the Sea with One Light, is rooted in the landscape of his hometown of Sapello, New Mexico—a small, rural community hundreds of miles from any ocean. Through vividly textured poems that confront death, poverty, the family disease of addiction, the expectations of masculinity, and the suffocation of a small rural town, Lucero explores what place truly means, where we go when grief leaves us suspended at a "traffic light that won't turn green," and what happens if we pull the key from ignition altogether.
Written with careful attention to both traditional and innovative forms, the collection invites us to follow the speaker—who repeatedly finds himself at the bottom of the sea navigating an impossible terrain where memory, grief, and longing converge—to meditate on the relationships that define us, those we hold close, those that wound us, and those we spend a lifetime trying to understand.
Praise for Alejandro Lucero
“Whether looming fire or slatted sunlight, in Alejandro Lucero’s poems, there’s nothing predictable about the weather! Like an oncoming thunderstorm, this astounding debut crackles with love’s inevitable lightning. With compassion and care, it illuminates the lineage of ancestry—the insights and the imperfections—if, like Lucero, we’re courageous enough to admit them. What is love after all but one of life’s greatest labors?” —Yona Harvey, author of Leap & Grow Feathers
“These poems are emotionally rich and complicated. Loss, shame, tenderness, and bewilderment resonant individually but also intersect in impactful and surprising ways. Family isn’t elevated to myth or fable—the looking back is candid and lyrical, which infuses the poems with an intimacy that jolts, that lingers. I found myself moved by what was being said and marveling at how it was being said. I was especially struck by the speaker’s own journey—the discoveries and the refusals, the love and the grief, the realization that home is a splintered and splendid space. Alejandro Lucero has crafted a memorable debut. I loved dwelling with these poems.” —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
“‘We live in these echoes.’ In Sapello, cheatgrass grows wild, wishes fill a body, a trailer whines like a dying bloodhound, drought and fire haunt, sexuality attunes the peripheries, ‘the cats want to fly away; they don't mind/ being taken,’ and the dead resurrect as sonnets. Alejandro Lucero’s riveting debut collection lays bare inheritances of grief and the unsaid—spells to ward off and conjure place, hard-wrought memory, and blown-pilot-light nostalgia. Lucero shakes the restless skeletons loose. Be ready for how the bones speak.” —Felicia Zamora, author of Murmuration Archives
“Lucero’s gorgeous book is a loving tribute to those dots on the map that shape the rest of our lives: our small towns, our flawed parents, our mostly uneventful childhoods. And he reminds us that the farther we journey from them, temporally, geographically, or both, the more treasured they become because they’re the evidence of who we are…” —Rigoberto González, from the Foreword
“Lucero strives to answer the multiple-choice questions that many hearts ask. How do we love? How do we forgive the ones we love? How do we hold onto to them when grief and time threatens to snatch them away? Vulnerable, poignant, and woven with a clear-eyed lyricism, Lucero’s poems perform the ‘wing work / of a human heart.’” —Janice N. Harrington, author of Yard Show
FormatPaperback, Hardcover
Pages120 pages
Publication DateApril 6, 2027
ISBN9781968507268
From $19.00
Note: This is a preorder. Book will ship prior to its publication date.
