Crying My Best, Volume 2

"There is very little crying in Angelica Esquivel's debut poetry collection, Crying My Best. If anything, here, tears are dissected so we can glimpse their origin, and often their origin begins with the silences and contradictions that shape family life. Addiction. Death. Patriarchy. Love. But Esquivel's lyrical narratives go beyond the familial to also dissect the tears that shape environmental degradation, gender violence, and those shed on account of dispossession and colonization. There is no romanticizing here: the past is not past, and the work that one must do to name it, to own it, to live with it, is difficult. No crying in these poems, just the love of language and Esquivel's intimate candor. Read every word, take in every image. Don't blink. If you do, you might just miss that beautiful line that could bring you back to the center of your being." —Octavio Quintanilla, 2025 Texas Poet Laureate, VersoFrontera Series Editor, and author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours

"Crying My Best sings urgent songs of a beating heart at the site of an accident, of alcohol-soaked memories tender and brutal, of ancient wounds riven deep into fruit. Mothers go to law school, fathers stumble, daughters drift and breathe with mushrooms. Read Angelica Esquivel's divining language: here's a spell to dream cast ancestral memory, here's a healing with a scar's strength."—Petra Kuppers, author of Diver Beneath the Street

"Wáchale! Coatlicue & The Popol Vuh meet Los Tigres del Norte & Sábado Gigante in this collection full of sparkle, humor, depth, and presence with the Divine. Here, family memory coincides with kōans, curries, and girls shouting into rotating fans. Thank Pachamama for Angelica Esquivel. With a sharpened pencil, sequined hands and a mouth full of black dripping wax, she writes poems built to shatter." —Violeta Garza, author of Brava

"In Crying My Best, this memorable first collection, Angelica Esquivel has written mostly short poems, but each word feels carefully chosen, sculpted onto the page. In one poem where she collects words from different American languages and histories, she concludes "Each set of syllables is smooth and heavy, shining/darkly from my mouth like obsidian mirrors//divining both the future and past." And the horrors of the contemporary moment are also in these poems: children hide from roving ICE agents, families rupture from indifference and abuse, and "I teach at a school in America, so I must/know how to pack a bullet wound." But this poet can move to the other side, toward the light—"my hair lovingly braided & my feet planted on the earth—to be a sacred/creature recognizing other sacred creatures." And she has earned this; we believe her!" —Keith Taylor, author of What Can the Matter Be?

"Angelica Esquivel writes of familial lore through pasts and futures from which the speakers of these poems show us the heavy transformation of familial myth through the lyrical making and unmaking of the present self. Esquivel is "—wanting—to—make—/—something—beautiful—that—hurts—no—one—" and certainly succeeds as each page is that kindness taking hold like a root in soil. Full of monoliths, chopped-down trees, job application rejections, Kahlo, revised resume after revised resume, and the world and everything in it exhaling together, Crying My Best is an affecting debut of poetic dexterity. These haunted, raw, and sometimes wry poems bloom from a voice you will revisit immediately upon closing the book, if you close it at all." —Tyler Michael Jacobs, author of The Weight of Drought