My Mother, the Butcher Volume 15

Gerard Robledo is a Mexican American poet from San Antonio and an Immigrant son. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and teaches at Palo Alto College. His Spanish language poetry translations, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in Voices de la Luna, The Texas Observer, Oyster River Pages, Solstice Magazine, Poetrybay, Vox Populi, and others. He is a Macondo Writers’ Workshop Fellow, and a recipient of the 2020 Eduardo Corral Emerging Latinx Writers Mentorship.

• Murder Ballad A Sunday Without Eucharist To Love in the Simplest Way A Miron Zownir Photo (Moscow, 1998) A Pillow Made of Knuckles Off Brand Man Skin The Last Days of Summer Text message to an ex-girlfriend: Mother’s Day Coritos de Machismo The Last Days of Summer for an Alcoholic What’s Left The Ephemeral Lighthouse The Summer of Children How to Raise a Poet Mother’s Day Acknowledgments About the Author

“Penned with intense and captivating energy, Gerard Robledo’s My Mother the Butcher is deeply pleasurable to read, even as it evokes painful family dynamics. In these poems, mundane moments are rendered in a way that reveals the intensity of feeling and dire stakes beneath them. I feel in this book the aches and pressures of parenthood, the living ongoingness of childhood wounds, and the gift and burden of poetry as a way to make a song of so much grief. Here the self is a threshold across which inheritances barrel concurrently, in and out, forward and back. A gorgeous collection—visceral, musical, propulsive, and vivid in ways that wow me again and again.” - Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat “Gerard Robeldo’s vulnerability and self-awareness are striking and brutal—’You ruined my life/and all that made happiness/cleaved never to sing/verses of love your child needs.’ My Mother, the Butcher is a decisive portrayal of a family, and Robledo is a skilled observer, ‘sling my pickled mother off the floor & over/my shoulder, dangling like my first kill, first blood./The first voice I felt caress my ear & lull me,/now callous, melting on my neck.’ In the face of trauma and nostalgia, Robledo finds redemption in the mundane forging a hopeful path forward.” - Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion“Filled with tenderness and lyrical beauty, My Mother, The Butcher, paints a searing portrait of childhood abuse and its aftermath, interrogating the way trauma is inherited, internalized, and extended across generations. In poems that are carved out of lived experience, Robledo constructs a complex masculinity, examining fatherhood, Mexican-American heritage, and the damage incurred in pursuit of the American dream. A deeply felt, ruthlessly honest quest for healing and forgiveness.” - Kai Carlson-Wee, author of Rail“My Mother, the Butcher invites you in for a home-cooked meal, just don’t expect your typical choice cut meat, though there’s plenty of beef. There’s tofu, veggies, and ‘fake meat’ prepared by a poet who, as a single dad, must ‘be everything: a good father & mother’ to his daughter against the forces of his own dysfunctional family. Machismo, nourishing mothers, identity politics are on the cutting board and nothing is spared evisceration. Robledo’s debut collection cuts through the fat, muscle, gristle and marrow ‘in search of an ease / to parenthood.’” - John Olivares Espinoza, author of The Date Fruit Elegies“Gerard Robledo’s debut collection, My Mother, the Butcher, begins with a ‘Murder Ballad’ and the story of ‘how much it costs to love a child.’ The cost of love in these poems, however, is not a nurturing one: it’s a reckoning, ‘my mother’s bloody apron, the butcher. She wears sections of my body & childhood, outlines choice cuts . . . ‘ an understanding of how speakers caught in cycles of traumas try not to repeat the violence of the past, but rather embrace a tenderness against the butchering.” - Richard Boada, author of We Find Each Other in the Darkness