In her debut chapbook, Wishbones, Elena Montes weaves together fragments of memories and photographs, 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, exploring sex, love, and friendship as she searches for belonging and self-understanding.
Wishbones asks: How do we revisit our past with the clarity and honesty it deserves? Which memories do we hold onto, and which do we reshape?
Her hybrid writing walks the line between fact and fiction, storytelling and memoir, straying from the mold of linear narrative and inviting readers to engage in the process of reconstructing history alongside her.
What People are Saying
-
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.
-
"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.
-
"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 THE TEXT
A Definition: Mi Media Naranja, meaning my other half.
3 years later, my father has just gotten out of rehab. I visited him in a halfway house with a communal backyard.
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 went into one cup.
His juice went into another.
One teaspoon of sugar
Two cubes of ice
El azucar se hace con sangre.
Sugar is made from blood.
