Other Stories to Tell Ourselves • Print + E-book

Summary

Other Stories to Tell Ourselves delivers the news that nothing in the world is final or natural. In his debut chapbook, poet and truth teller Vincente G. Perez counters the abstractions of race and colonization with a passionate clarity that dares his readers to seek out new lives hidden within the hum of the modern world. Other Stories to Tell Ourselves asks: Why fear the unknown when facing it could lead to new life?

Details

• Selected for the 2023 Emerging Poets Chapbook Series
• Saddle-stitched, risograph cover, 40 pages, 5″ x 7.25″, FSC-certified paper
• Purchase allows three PDF downloads
• Order print + e-book
• Order print book only

Praise

“The poems in Other Stories To Tell Ourselves are working overtime on the level of craft and audacity. Within its 29 pages, Vincente G. Perez explores colonization (how it affected black and brown people when it happened and how it affects us now), mental health (‘I turned my pen / outwards when asked to turn in’) and the role of poetry in the times we’re living in, while masterfully using form, metaphor, voice, and repetition. At times, I found myself audibly saying “mmm” when seemingly-simple, weighty statements showed up exactly when I needed them (‘I put a punch down on a page call it a poem’). At other times, I was both shaking my head at all the things that human beings have been subjected to (‘they drowned my home —a Christian baptism’) and impressed with the intentional usage of language that Perez has clearly honed after time spent working with words. This book makes me want to continue calling out the abnormal things we’ve come to normalize—like America’s denial of its racist and bloody history—via foolishly good storytelling and lines, as Perez has done here.”
        —KB Brookins, author of Freedom House

“Other Stories To Tell Ourselves elucidates the politically personal cost of well-oiled oppressive systems facilitated by breaking people. Through these poems we’re invited to stare down centuries-long violences without flinching, ‘laugh with me,’ Vincente says. With a skillful vulnerability the intangible is made into workably mundane material for reflection and for action. In these poems death is not the end and capitalism is not the beginning. This work is at once a refreshingly humorous and deeply serious call to remember, interrogate, listen, and uncover.”
        —Darius Simpson

Author

Vincente G. Perez is a poet, scholar, and writer working at the intersection of poetry, Hip-Hop, and digital culture. He makes work that refuses binary thinking, which allows him to be in conversation with people, places and things that refuse to make sense in a Western framework. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies program at UC Berkeley & holds a BA in Anthropology and Comparative Race & Ethnic Studies from The University of Chicago. They were a 2021-22 Poetry and the Senses Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center. Their poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry.onl, Honey Literary, Snarl Magazine, Digging Through the Fat, River and South Review, and more.

Artwork

Cover by Nora Kelly.