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Sebastián H. Páramo renders a semi-autobiographical collection, utilizing self-portraiture and memory to uncover how his Texan, working-class, Mexican American identity shapes his relationship to his half brother and to his family’s burning desire to become American.

Portrait of Us Burning begins with the humble picture of an immigrant American family. This picture starts to disintegrate—and, ultimately, burns—with the need to understand an inciting event that haunts the family throughout the second half of the collection. As the poems gather force and the picture dissolves further, Páramo asks us again and again: What does it mean to burn while becoming a part of a whole?

Advance Praise

Sebastián H. Páramo’s Portrait of Us Burning glows with possibility. The pyre is a rivalry between half-brothers for their father’s love, for belonging beyond divorce, for a future and a family that is not “anyone else’s life.” What I respect—as a poet and as a Chicana daughter—is the vulnerability it takes to confess that sometimes being born feels like a cosmic mistake. Páramo is asking for forgiveness without knowing from whom. What do we do when we feel indebted to the suffering our parents endured for not being white? For how they chose to love in gasps, in clutches—to make surviving desirable? Who do we become? Portrait of Us Burning sips at these questions. It is a pleasure and a relief to read what so many Chicanos rarely say. – Sara Borjas, author of Heart like a Window, Mouth like a Cliff

Portrait of Us Burning wrestles with the deep, unknowable layers of familial history and the myriad possibilities of narrative a son imagines to better know from whom and from where he comes. For those interested in narratives of immigrant parents and experiences of first-generation children, this collection is lush with material. Traveling between geographical borderlands (crossing between Mexico and the United States) and the borderlands of memory (the synapses of memory that result from intergenerational trauma), these well-wrought and complex poems serve as exploration of lineage and testament to love of family even under the most difficult of circumstances. —Ángel García, author of Teeth Never Sleep