Querida is Nathan Xavier Osorio’s debut collection of poetry which has won the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry, and Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award. I was first introduced to Nathan’s work in his Chapbook The Last Town Before the Mojave, which he has embedded and grown within Querida. I was astounded with Osorio’s image’s ability to split open the vast distance between our damp enclosed Edinburgh and the gorgeously strident Southern Californian San Gabriel valley into a potent universality that feels like our eyes are premature to.
“Water, the dark glimmer of a dead god” [p.63]
Osorio’s verse overflows the capacity of a sentence, yet never overwhelms or neglects the reader; it is viscous yet stark. It swallows both a grotesque cosmic collapsing Capitalocene, and devoted meditations of porcelain statuettes or fruit in hot plastic containers. All within a voice that cuts straight to each reader whilst retaining the nostalgic intimacy of vacant rooms lit by the redder twilight of an approaching desert storm.
In May of this year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Osorio on Querida. Querida has previously been described as a place based meditation. The place central to the collection is the community on the outskirts of the LA sprawl at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains that fences out the Mojave.
“The cindery hills erupting in bloom” [p.66]
I was curious about Osorio’s relationship to the language that creates such potent imagery. He told me that front and centre to poetry is the poet’s ‘capacity of language.’ By situating his collection in a place of linguistic diversity that challenges the “assumed supremacy of English,” Osorio is interested in writing into “the darkness in the periphery of language.” You can feel this venture into a darkness throughout the collection as Osorio’s way of writing into this emptied periphery of language is in turn managing “things we cannot quite name.” Osorio represents such things through images that resemble “bodies gasping for water” or “the fiery fringe of the mountain scape.” Osorio expressed that these images are in themselves a language too, for the people centered in Querida. People whose time and place are “marked by the collapse of the climate” and “the collapse of bodies under capitalism.”
“His disposition industrial like the tenacity of SPAM” [p.8]
Osorio’s images for the language of those collapsed under the US Capitalocene is consequential of “having to create your own landscape in one that has been extracted from you,” or form how one inherits language in an alienating and indifferent land.
“Our throats opened skyward and dry heaving in ceremony to the ceaseless blue.The blunt heat fracturing the radiance of our skin, lineage blistering into opal cysts.” [p.5]
These pursuits are what conjure the continuous tensions of idolisation centring the collection. The tension between extraction and idolisation, and the tension between Osorio’s vast cast of idols. Ranging from the diamond of a baseball stadium, to pixels on a Nintendo 64, to roadside descansos and the bejewelled swash of litter, to antennas that crown the mountains who are eternally dying. Yet these tensions prevail to sit succinctly and syncretic in Querida, as both intensities are simultaneously held dear in Osorio’s incredible verse.
“Oh, how the San Gabriels still burn and snow” [p.6]
At the end of my year abroad, I had the privilege of road tripping from Washington DC to Portland, Oregon, driving through the Mojave, where I got to see Osorio’s landscape of boundless pyres. Throughout this article are some pictures I got to take along the way.
Photos provided by Kirsten Wright.
