Wishbones: a chapbook by Elena Montes
Hardcover: $27.99
Soft Cover: $24.76
36 pages
5.5 x 0.25 x 8.5
Finishing Line Press, 2026
In her debut chapbook, Wishbones, Elena Montes weaves together fragments of memory and image, reconstructing a childhood shaped by the experience of being the product of two distinct cultures, tongues, and economic realities. Against the backdrop of her biological father’s battle with alcoholism and her parents’ separation, Elena journeys from adolescence to adulthood, intimacy, identity, and the search for belonging.
Praise
"What is Elena Montes wishing for as she reaches into memory’s murk for the slippery bones of her upbringing? To bring the juxtapositions into unity and construct a self? With a poet’s ear and a fiction writer’s attentiveness, Montes cuts to the ventricle in this genre-blurring lyric essay, where the ingredients blend, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts."
-Jeffrey McDaniel, three-time Best American Poetry nominee, and author of The Splinter Factory.
"Precise and vivid, these poems cut to the heart—honest in voice, sharply crafted, deeply vulnerable, and powerfully compelling.”
-Mandy Kahn, author and performer of Gateways to Peace, performed at the Getty and the Barrick Museums, Best American Poetry selectee, and American Life of Poetry selectee.
"Reading Elena's poems "Mi Media Naranja," "Funeral," & "Wishbones," I find them both direct and quiet-- speaking from the bone, the orange, the iron water-- they resonate with an emotional clarity of vision."
-Chessy Normile, author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, and recipient of the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize.
Preview an Excerpt
A Definition: Mi Media Naranja, meaning my other half.
My father plucks an orange from the tree -
Human beings used to be orange shaped, he says.
From his back pocket, he pulls a knife,
And separates the globe into two perfect halves.
Eso es mio y esto es para ti.
Mira …las caras.
The juice from my half wen’t into one cup.
His juice wen’t into the another.
One teaspoon of sugar
Two cubes of ice.
El azucar se hace con sangre.
Sugar is made from blood.
Reader Responses
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