“A provocative voice of the Latinx liminal space, Xavier takes turns seducing and alerting the reader with a fearless sensuality and a knowing lack of regret. A much-needed, streetwise collection living at the intersection of raw desire and a deep compassion for a marginalized people.” — Ed Morales, journalist, filmmaker & poet

“From the heartbreak of childhood abuse to the beauty of unconditional love for a life-saving rainbow community and Nuyorican underclass so vividly portrayed in poetic street scenes, Emanuel Xavier takes us on his life’s journey spanning years of award-winning poetry. Laying bare truths of oppressive conventions that, if left unchallenged, would lay waste to creativity and the remarkable diversity of life. Selected Poems by Emanuel Xavier are raw metaphors, aesthetic beauty, history, passion, and so much more. Emanuel Xavier is one of the seminal poets of the Nuyorican Literary Movement.” — Nancy Mercado, poet & activist

“Emanuel Xavier’s is a blasphemer, and a guerilla poet, whose verses can hurt like bullets. His Selected Poems can be read as the autobiography of a Latinx poet who desperately fights to break from “the mentiras” his parents fed him as he grew up in el barrio, which he acknowledges as his true country. But el barrio can be a cruel world, and Xavier’s subjects are queer people, the transgendered, the powerless and invisible outcasts the American Dream discards as unrecyclable trash. 

Echoes of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’—in their audacity, their urgency— can be heard in Xavier’s early poetry; but, by the time he arrives at the final poems in this collection, Emanuel Xavier’s anger, and outrage, have been surprisingly replaced by a poignant wisdom. The journey he has so vividly evoked is that of a hero.” — Jaime Manrique, novelist & poet         

“For three decades, Emanuel Xavier has been our poet of the streets, of the balls, of the pier, through our loves, lives lost, and in the growth and ruin of our city. Finally, a new generation has a chance to breathe through his collected poems, a monument to our past, our collectivity and our hearts.” — Sarah Schulman, author & activist

“Thank goodness we at last get the Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier! This collection pulses with the necessary urgency we've come to expect from this luminary poet. While reading you can feel the clarity of his voice speaking up to you from the page with its razor-blade precision offering insight and humor navigating the multifaceted truths of this world.” — Sam Sax, poet

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"Xavier is an accessible poet, but one who is unwilling to sacrifice the differences that make up our tangled identities for the sake of legibility or popularity. Blurring page and stage, lyric and narrative, humor and heartbreak, his poetry finds beauty in the most despised, a luminosity or radiance that is the other side of struggle and abjection, energy transferred at the limits of the page, where our bodies converge." — Urayoán Noel, poet QueerForty.com 

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"This is an amazing collection that perfectly encapsulates Emanuel Xavier’s growth as a man and as a poet." — Out in Print

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"Xavier promotes a vital project within his poetry, the continuation and representation of multifaceted Latinx lived reality." — a&u Magazine

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“In sharing his voice, Xavier also lets rise the voices of those we do not often see or hear, those who have been cast aside by society. Desire and compassion merge as we read and we find ourselves checking our inner feelings. At the same time, the past, the present and the future merge within us just as the poet moves from the poetry of anger and rage to the poetry of wisdom.” — Amos Lassen

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“Through these transcultural and multilingual legacies of Nuyorican history, which queer masculinity and break tradition, Selected Poems asks us to confront those words that are always “sacred and worth remembering.”“ — Harriet Books