Full Description
In Diego BÁez's debut collection, YaguaretÉ White, English, Spanish, and GuaranÍ encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar.
The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, BaÉz grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn't keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, BaÉz revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.
Notably, this raucous collection also wrestles with GuaranÍ, a state-recognized Indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay. GuaranÍ both structures and punctures the book, surfacing in a sequence of jokes that double as poems, and introducing but leaving unresolved ambient questions about local histories of militarism, masculine bravado, and the outlook of the campos. Cutting across borders of every kind, BaÉz's poems attempt to reconcile the incomplete, contradictory, and inconsistent experiences of a speaking self that resides between languages, nations, and generations.
YaguaretÉ White is a lyrical exploration of Paraguayan American identity and what it means to see through a colored whiteness in all of its tangled contradictions.
Contents
1YaguaretÉ WhiteWhat Has Gone Before
YoparÁ
Regalito
Lengua
Men Omitted From This Manuscript
Postcard from Your Semester Abroad, Volunteer Trip, and Mission Visit
A Comprehensive List of Famous Fictional Paraguayans
Mariscal Estigarribia
Like Father
Patronym
CaraÍ GuazÚ
Autonym
Postcard from Your Semester Abroad, Volunteer Trip, and Mission Visit
pukarà peteĩ
Google Translate
Call Sopa Sopa
PynandÍ
Postcard from Your Semester Abroad, Volunteer Trip, and Mission Visit
Portrait of the Artist with Club Foot
PynandÍ
The skin
Abuelo Delouses Mister
Etymologies
pukarà mokÕi
2
Honey
Yucca
Chestnut People (IndÍgena Red)
Postcard from Your Semester Abroad, Volunteer Trip, and Mission Visit
Americanism
Americano
Football poem
Passing Through Panama, En Route to ORD and Uptown, Chicago
Football poem
Football poem
Sporting History
Gallup, Inc.
Postcard from Your Semester Abroad, Volunteer Trip, and Mission Visit
Yuyos
3
Capybara Ouroboros
El Papa
Special Drawing Rights
American Marine
Himmelblau
pukarà mbohapy
Nueva Germania
San Francisco Potrero
On the Anniversary of the Second Founding of Buenos Aires
Mom Puts Miguel's Two-Week Sentence for DUI in Perspective
White Boy Wasted
Basic White
The Assumption of Whiteness
Grace Baptist
Lynch Christmas
Manger Made By Hands
Luna de Miel
Inheritance
Notas
Acknowledgements
