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YOU
From the author of My OTHER TONGUE comes a new collection of prose poetry exploring the intergenerational inheritance of gendered violence.
Rosa Alcalá choreographs language to understand the body as it “gathers itself over time to become whole,” recovering the speaker’s intuition while unraveling memory to pinpoint the aches, anxieties, and lessons of a woman's survival. Ruminating on daughterhood, mothering, and the body's cumulative wisdom, YOU traces a jagged line through fears and joys both past and present.
Rosa Alcalá choreographs language to understand the body as it “gathers itself over time to become whole,” recovering the speaker’s intuition while unraveling memory to pinpoint the aches, anxieties, and lessons of a woman's survival. Ruminating on daughterhood, mothering, and the body's cumulative wisdom, YOU traces a jagged line through fears and joys both past and present.
80 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 9, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 29, 2024
A series of prose poems addressed to “you,” or a younger version of the speaker’s self. This collection explored the way that violence against women, whether experienced, threatened, or implied, shapes our lives. This was probably the best poetry collection I read this year. Almost every poem had something in it that resonated with me. I picked up this collection at the Texas Book Festival after skimming a few of the poems in the featured authors tent. I’m glad I did. It was definitely worth a read.
“The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others. / Each word its own past and desire / for a future. / Each word, each sentence, a fragment. / And how do you untangle from the telling the speaker’s motives? / Isn’t the second person a form of hiding? Why not just use the I?” (“How It Started, How It’s Going {An Introduction},” (2).
“At times I wanted to mistake myself for another and say, Sorry, you aren’t who I was looking for. Sorry to bother you” (“How It Started, How It’s Going {An Introduction},” (3).
“A Girl Like You” (33-35)
“The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others. / Each word its own past and desire / for a future. / Each word, each sentence, a fragment. / And how do you untangle from the telling the speaker’s motives? / Isn’t the second person a form of hiding? Why not just use the I?” (“How It Started, How It’s Going {An Introduction},” (2).
“At times I wanted to mistake myself for another and say, Sorry, you aren’t who I was looking for. Sorry to bother you” (“How It Started, How It’s Going {An Introduction},” (3).
“A Girl Like You” (33-35)
February 26, 2024
ARC given by Edelweiss+ for Honest Review
Tender prose of girlhood to motherhood and all the raw emotion in between. Alcalá speaks to a nebulous yet specific "you" throughout the poems that feels intimate and interesting.
Not as much metaphor as I usually love but the lyricism and emotion is full of life and love.
My favorite poems are: "You to the Future", "How You Became a Poet", "You, a Hand, Another", and "R U ok?! (8/3/2019)."
Tender prose of girlhood to motherhood and all the raw emotion in between. Alcalá speaks to a nebulous yet specific "you" throughout the poems that feels intimate and interesting.
Not as much metaphor as I usually love but the lyricism and emotion is full of life and love.
My favorite poems are: "You to the Future", "How You Became a Poet", "You, a Hand, Another", and "R U ok?! (8/3/2019)."
March 23, 2024
Boob metamorphosis. Nice
August 13, 2024
very emotional/raw poetry collection of different “yous” , read a couple poems before bed for a few weeks and loved it
September 7, 2024
Outstanding! I’m so glad this is out in the world.
April 15, 2025
for gender studies
May 28, 2025
these poems were kinda epic. reminded me a bit of Diannely Antigua's work.
September 7, 2025
loved this collection!
“how do you untangle from the telling from the speaker’s motives? isn’t the second person a form of hiding? why not just use the I?”
“how do you untangle from the telling from the speaker’s motives? isn’t the second person a form of hiding? why not just use the I?”
January 11, 2025
What I wrote about this book at LitHub:
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen illustrated, palpably, the power of second person and its instant placement of the reader into the text and its events. Alcalá demonstrates that power again in YOU.
Here, we read about “you” on her knees begging a lover to take her back. We read about a daughter who learns about Houdini and wants “you,” her mother, to tie her up under a desk and time her escape again and again. (“What are you preparing her for?” Alcalá asks.)
We read a list of advice from “your” mother, which includes cooking tips alongside how to flee or contend with men. As with Joe Brainard’s I Remember, what might at first glance seem bloodless description quickly proves itself to be pulsing with importance. YOU is incantatory, and I was briskly caught in Alcalá’s spell.
These poems powerfully address the knotty realities for mothers, daughters, girlhood, womanhood, and their inheritances: longing, terror, wisdom, kinship, jealousy, desire. In YOU, Alcalá assembles a triptych—herself at its center, her mother and daughter on either side—to present us with a tableau of the potent experiences of womanhood from different angles.
Page after page, her descriptions accrete to a simultaneously poignant and biting investigation of what women endure. In one particularly powerful poem, “How You Became a Poet,” Alcalá describes being a small child and seeing her father harm her mother. “You were invisible but with such big eyes,” she writes. “You were learning not that a woman can’t move up but that she can’t get out.”
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen illustrated, palpably, the power of second person and its instant placement of the reader into the text and its events. Alcalá demonstrates that power again in YOU.
Here, we read about “you” on her knees begging a lover to take her back. We read about a daughter who learns about Houdini and wants “you,” her mother, to tie her up under a desk and time her escape again and again. (“What are you preparing her for?” Alcalá asks.)
We read a list of advice from “your” mother, which includes cooking tips alongside how to flee or contend with men. As with Joe Brainard’s I Remember, what might at first glance seem bloodless description quickly proves itself to be pulsing with importance. YOU is incantatory, and I was briskly caught in Alcalá’s spell.
These poems powerfully address the knotty realities for mothers, daughters, girlhood, womanhood, and their inheritances: longing, terror, wisdom, kinship, jealousy, desire. In YOU, Alcalá assembles a triptych—herself at its center, her mother and daughter on either side—to present us with a tableau of the potent experiences of womanhood from different angles.
Page after page, her descriptions accrete to a simultaneously poignant and biting investigation of what women endure. In one particularly powerful poem, “How You Became a Poet,” Alcalá describes being a small child and seeing her father harm her mother. “You were invisible but with such big eyes,” she writes. “You were learning not that a woman can’t move up but that she can’t get out.”
December 10, 2024
from "How It Started, How It's Going {An Introduction}": "The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others. // Each word its own past and desire / for a future. // Each word, each sentence, a fragment."
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews