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Lessons on Expulsion
An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry.The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous.Covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat. Heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning. Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work.What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich.But I just nursed on this leather whip.I just splattered my sheets with my sadness.From “Poem of My Humiliations”.“What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border―the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.
96 pages, Paperback
First published July 11, 2017
About the author
Erika L. Sánchez
8 books1,506 followersErika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. A poet, novelist, and essayist, her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, is a New York Times Bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. She was a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, and a recent recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She has recently been appointed the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Chair in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at DePaul University and is part of the inaugural core faculty of the Randolph College Low Residency MFA Program.
Erika grew up in the Mexican working class town of Cicero, Illinois, which borders the city's southwest side. In fact, her childhood apartment was so close to Chicago that she could hit it with her shoe if she flung it out the window. (Maybe she tried this, maybe she didn't.)
As a daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Erika has always been determined to defy borders of any kind. And, not surprisingly, her clothes perpetually smelled of fried tortillas when she was a child. Her role model was—and continues to be—Lisa Simpson. As a result, she was a young and sometimes overbearing (but in a cute way?) feminist and overachiever. Ever since she was a 12-year-old nerd in giant bifocals, she's dreamt of becoming a successful writer.
Erika graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago, then went onto Madrid, Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship. There, she wrote poems late into the night, taught English at a secondary school, and ate a medley of delicious cured meats. After her scholarship, Erika moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. She did not love Albuquerque but was pleased with the clear skies and ample parking. She graduated with distinction.
Erika has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, Bread Loaf Scholarship, and the 2013 "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize. In 2015, Erika was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation.
Erika's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many prestigious literary journals, including Poets.org, Vinyl Poetry, Guernica, diode, Boston Review, ESPN.com, the Paris Review, Gulf Coast, POETRY Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. Her poetry has also been featured on “Latino USA” on NPR and published in Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking 2015).
In the fall of 2014, the Guild Complex of Chicago invited Erika and four other writers to participate in Kapittel, the International Festival of Literature and Freedom of Speech in Stavanger, Norway where she met incredible exiled writers from around the world and ate pickled fish for breakfast.
From 2012-2015 Erika was the sex and love advice columnist for Cosmopolitan for Latinas. She loves giving women feminist, sex positive advice. And no, she is not the "Latina Carrie Bradshaw." Seriously, please don't call her that. Erika has also contributed to a variety of top tier publications, such as Time, The Guardian, NBC News, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera, Truthout, Salon, BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, Jezebel, Her articles have been republished all around the world and have been translated into several languages. She has been profiled by NBC News, PBS, Telemundo, and has appeared on National Public Radio on many occasions. Her essay “Crying in the Bathroom” was published in the anthology Double Bind: Women on Ambition (Liveright 2017).
Erika grew up in the Mexican working class town of Cicero, Illinois, which borders the city's southwest side. In fact, her childhood apartment was so close to Chicago that she could hit it with her shoe if she flung it out the window. (Maybe she tried this, maybe she didn't.)
As a daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Erika has always been determined to defy borders of any kind. And, not surprisingly, her clothes perpetually smelled of fried tortillas when she was a child. Her role model was—and continues to be—Lisa Simpson. As a result, she was a young and sometimes overbearing (but in a cute way?) feminist and overachiever. Ever since she was a 12-year-old nerd in giant bifocals, she's dreamt of becoming a successful writer.
Erika graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago, then went onto Madrid, Spain on a Fulbright Scholarship. There, she wrote poems late into the night, taught English at a secondary school, and ate a medley of delicious cured meats. After her scholarship, Erika moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico where she received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico. She did not love Albuquerque but was pleased with the clear skies and ample parking. She graduated with distinction.
Erika has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, Bread Loaf Scholarship, and the 2013 "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize. In 2015, Erika was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation.
Erika's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many prestigious literary journals, including Poets.org, Vinyl Poetry, Guernica, diode, Boston Review, ESPN.com, the Paris Review, Gulf Coast, POETRY Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. Her poetry has also been featured on “Latino USA” on NPR and published in Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking 2015).
In the fall of 2014, the Guild Complex of Chicago invited Erika and four other writers to participate in Kapittel, the International Festival of Literature and Freedom of Speech in Stavanger, Norway where she met incredible exiled writers from around the world and ate pickled fish for breakfast.
From 2012-2015 Erika was the sex and love advice columnist for Cosmopolitan for Latinas. She loves giving women feminist, sex positive advice. And no, she is not the "Latina Carrie Bradshaw." Seriously, please don't call her that. Erika has also contributed to a variety of top tier publications, such as Time, The Guardian, NBC News, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera, Truthout, Salon, BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan, Jezebel, Her articles have been republished all around the world and have been translated into several languages. She has been profiled by NBC News, PBS, Telemundo, and has appeared on National Public Radio on many occasions. Her essay “Crying in the Bathroom” was published in the anthology Double Bind: Women on Ambition (Liveright 2017).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
December 26, 2017
A moving, often sad, collection of poems.
Erika Sanchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and her poems are filled with their struggles and her own. Her feeling like she has failed to be their ideal daughter. Sex and its pleasures and its failures. Suicide attempts and mass murders in Brazil and other Latin American countries, as well as in Mexico. Loss, loss, and more loss told with brilliant imagery and metaphors.
A powerful group of poems.
Erika Sanchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and her poems are filled with their struggles and her own. Her feeling like she has failed to be their ideal daughter. Sex and its pleasures and its failures. Suicide attempts and mass murders in Brazil and other Latin American countries, as well as in Mexico. Loss, loss, and more loss told with brilliant imagery and metaphors.
A powerful group of poems.
April 7, 2017
Startling, assertive, wild, & wonderful. One of my favorite collections so far this year.
July 31, 2017
While the collection of poems is well-written, it returns to the same well, over and over again, throughout. If a poem isn't about the debasement of sex (in general), it has to use either "Shit" or "Excrement" as a metaphor. Overall, the poems weren't my cup of tea. A lot of were ugly and/or unpleasant. There were some interesting gleanings on the effects of poverty, the emotional ramifications, and how seeing yourself through the lens of treatment can lead to a continuous self-undoing; and if this had been the "meat" of the work, I might have liked the book a bit more. But the lack of focus, (or the focus only in on self-loathing and the loathing of others in turn), isn't quite my favorite form of poetry.
January 2, 2022
"because brown isn't high art
unless you are a beautiful savage."
"how do you explain what you've done?
With your hybrid mouth, a split tongue"
"in chicago, we live in basements--the rattle
of heaters, jaundiced paint.
The smell of beans boiling, breaking
their skins. everything fried up in pig grease."
you see, this is what i meant. in learning to explore more writers, i decided to finally give this a read as it's been sitting on my bookshelf.
i admit, erika sanchez is pretty much a superhero to me. a writer from cicero! unheard of! it's where I'm from and lived most of my life. this collection of poems was brazen, unapologetic and beautifully vulnerable. short and easily readable, these poems breath a new air into the scene. I'm incredibly excited for her new collection of essays and as a fellow mexican / cicero kid, I'm going to do my part and preorder it. supporting mi gente siempre
unless you are a beautiful savage."
"how do you explain what you've done?
With your hybrid mouth, a split tongue"
"in chicago, we live in basements--the rattle
of heaters, jaundiced paint.
The smell of beans boiling, breaking
their skins. everything fried up in pig grease."
you see, this is what i meant. in learning to explore more writers, i decided to finally give this a read as it's been sitting on my bookshelf.
i admit, erika sanchez is pretty much a superhero to me. a writer from cicero! unheard of! it's where I'm from and lived most of my life. this collection of poems was brazen, unapologetic and beautifully vulnerable. short and easily readable, these poems breath a new air into the scene. I'm incredibly excited for her new collection of essays and as a fellow mexican / cicero kid, I'm going to do my part and preorder it. supporting mi gente siempre
January 8, 2019
Erika L. Sánchez’s poetry is hard to forget once you first read it – and it’s not just because of her searing, vibrant writing voice. Her first book of poetry, LESSONS ON EXPULSION, shares her upbringing in the U.S. as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and how her culture and personal attitudes and beliefs have shaped her perception of the world. She delivers anecdotes on factory workers, teenagers, prostitutes, assault victims, and drug traffickers with a journalist’s frankness, a painter’s surrealism, and a lover’s restlessness. As a result, her work is rich with sensory details, hard questions, and startling images that lay bare the ugliness and wrongness of what she sees. This raw, unflinching collection might make some poetry readers uneasy at times. But it’s also a necessary book for the here and now, without question.
July 18, 2022
"The lights flash white and the sirens begin
your brittle gaze still skins the beauty from this paradise
overall, this collection had a few stunning poems but many did n0t really align to the style of poetry I enjoy, and therefore I found the collection to be lacklustre.
July 14, 2022
Crossing
(...) 487 years ago
people here crossed the ocean
and savagely fused with the inhabitants.
467 years later
my parents crossed the border
in the trunk of a Cadillac.
I was born in Chicago.
I dance in the foreign streets,
devour oysters until I feel guilty,
light candles, and believe in God.
I smoke until my mouth hurts.
While I’m at the Prado enjoying Goya and Velázquez,
my father is rising before the sun
to assemble air filters.
On my way home
I want to read a poem aloud on the Metro
about my illiterate grandmother, about my father
with the glue burns on his hands.
Sometimes between sleep and waking life
I think I’m in another city.
The mornings taste like bruises.
I call my mother to explain
how I scour landscapes, fold them
and keep them in a soft leather bag.
I tell her how I want to understand
the violence tangled in this tissue,
the desert threaded in this flesh.
(...) 487 years ago
people here crossed the ocean
and savagely fused with the inhabitants.
467 years later
my parents crossed the border
in the trunk of a Cadillac.
I was born in Chicago.
I dance in the foreign streets,
devour oysters until I feel guilty,
light candles, and believe in God.
I smoke until my mouth hurts.
While I’m at the Prado enjoying Goya and Velázquez,
my father is rising before the sun
to assemble air filters.
On my way home
I want to read a poem aloud on the Metro
about my illiterate grandmother, about my father
with the glue burns on his hands.
Sometimes between sleep and waking life
I think I’m in another city.
The mornings taste like bruises.
I call my mother to explain
how I scour landscapes, fold them
and keep them in a soft leather bag.
I tell her how I want to understand
the violence tangled in this tissue,
the desert threaded in this flesh.
March 8, 2019
"And when the meaning is all gutted / from the day / I will delight / in the sticky mess, in a swirl / so deep I forget myself."
This month's #3sunpoetry challenge was to read a book from a Latinx poet. I had heard good things about Lessons on Expulsion, so I decided to pick that up. This book was so damn good, and I fell in love with it.
Erika L. Sanchez's poems are haunting. She is bold and honest, and digs into the grittiness of the situations that she covers. This collection was pretty dark, and I found so much to connect with here. I also loved hearing her perspective on race issues in the poems, and so many of them were heartbreaking.
My top 5 poems in Lessons on Expulsion we're Quinceanera, Spring, Ama, Hija de la Chingada, and Self Portrait. Erika captures loss and the anger of teen girls so fucking well. I can't recommend this book enough, so just trust me that you need it in your life.
This month's #3sunpoetry challenge was to read a book from a Latinx poet. I had heard good things about Lessons on Expulsion, so I decided to pick that up. This book was so damn good, and I fell in love with it.
Erika L. Sanchez's poems are haunting. She is bold and honest, and digs into the grittiness of the situations that she covers. This collection was pretty dark, and I found so much to connect with here. I also loved hearing her perspective on race issues in the poems, and so many of them were heartbreaking.
My top 5 poems in Lessons on Expulsion we're Quinceanera, Spring, Ama, Hija de la Chingada, and Self Portrait. Erika captures loss and the anger of teen girls so fucking well. I can't recommend this book enough, so just trust me that you need it in your life.
January 3, 2023
Searing and relentless poems. I’m inspired and blown away by Sánchez’s fearless and innovative use of language, and the way she uses the language and architecture of poetry to depict emotional truths with startling clarity. I feel this collection is a story dunked in sudden ice water. I come out sopping with violent clarity.
March 9, 2018
If I had to pick one word to describe Lessons on Expulsion, it would be “brutal.” The eye-catching cover, depicting a woman wearing a white-skinned, rosy-cheeked mask sewn to her face but torn, seems very appropriate, because of the comments on race, beauty standards, and desire. I would like to know if it was painting specifically for this book or not.
“Lessons,” the author’s first poetry collection, wields sex like a weapon. This is not a straightforward story of “young girl from conservative background discovers sexuality and frees herself from repressive situation.” Sometimes we do read about the discovery and revelation of sexuality, but it is always with a hard edge, as one poem concludes with this heartbreaking series of lines: “Now you’re a grown woman / who can fuck her way across the world, / if she wants. / But when you wrap yourself / around your man, / when he yanks your hair / the way you like, / you still ask him to pretend / as if you hold a beautiful rapture / between your legs. / You still ask him to pretend / as if you’re human” (“Hija de la Chingada” 27). In this world, sex starts at pleasure and ends in power.
“Orchid” follows a similar, terrible path, begun with a terribly misogynistic quote from the Marquis de Sade about woman’s lack of a right to control over her own body. The first lines describe a young girl’s contemplation of dyed-blonde prostitutes, whose tired looks contrast with her young mind’s idealized idea of what it means to be blonde and white. Then we are in Paris, as an early-20s woman contemplates the sexual desire in a Manet painting. Then the poem returns to the world of prostitutes, and the marks that their work leaves: “My boyfriend lives next to a motel now, / in the urban blight of a desert city, / and after lunch today, a woman in gray sweats / walks past his house toward a mammoth SUV. / She walks slowly, as if splintered, as if / something is already inside her” (39).
Throughout the book, there are references to Mexico’s drug culture and the poetic speaker’s desire/attempts to expand her horizons beyond the backbreaking labor that her immigrant parents have endured, but those did not stick with me as much.
I honestly really dislike the blurb on the back from Juan Felipe Herrera. His description “this is the underground candy of the flower-stomper & mother-breaker” trivializes a brutal poem about rape (Rompe-madres is a character in "Narco"). Painting the world of "Lessons on Expulsion" as some sort of upside-down, carnivalesque world that delights in shocking the square folks is an oversimplification. Yes, it's shocking and, yes, it challenges our notions of what is and is not acceptable behavior, but it doesn't celebrate those things for their own sake. Sánchez pushes us out of our zones so that we will question how things have gotten to how they are, and whether they might need to change.
While his words may be less bombastic, I prefer Eduardo Corral’s description, which sits at the top of the back cover: “Sánchez makes visible the violence striking down Mexican women living on the border and interrogates the historical and the familial origins of misogyny. Her deft braiding of the beautiful and the grotesque infuses her language with a shimmering rawness and a startling immediacy.” This book is dealing with deep-seated issues, things stretching across generations and traditions--if we break with long-held conservativism, are we doomed to a world of "might is right"?
“Enjoy” is not the right word for my experience of this book, but it punched me in the face more than once and I will be thinking about it for quite some time. Sáchez’s voice is powerful.
“Lessons,” the author’s first poetry collection, wields sex like a weapon. This is not a straightforward story of “young girl from conservative background discovers sexuality and frees herself from repressive situation.” Sometimes we do read about the discovery and revelation of sexuality, but it is always with a hard edge, as one poem concludes with this heartbreaking series of lines: “Now you’re a grown woman / who can fuck her way across the world, / if she wants. / But when you wrap yourself / around your man, / when he yanks your hair / the way you like, / you still ask him to pretend / as if you hold a beautiful rapture / between your legs. / You still ask him to pretend / as if you’re human” (“Hija de la Chingada” 27). In this world, sex starts at pleasure and ends in power.
“Orchid” follows a similar, terrible path, begun with a terribly misogynistic quote from the Marquis de Sade about woman’s lack of a right to control over her own body. The first lines describe a young girl’s contemplation of dyed-blonde prostitutes, whose tired looks contrast with her young mind’s idealized idea of what it means to be blonde and white. Then we are in Paris, as an early-20s woman contemplates the sexual desire in a Manet painting. Then the poem returns to the world of prostitutes, and the marks that their work leaves: “My boyfriend lives next to a motel now, / in the urban blight of a desert city, / and after lunch today, a woman in gray sweats / walks past his house toward a mammoth SUV. / She walks slowly, as if splintered, as if / something is already inside her” (39).
Throughout the book, there are references to Mexico’s drug culture and the poetic speaker’s desire/attempts to expand her horizons beyond the backbreaking labor that her immigrant parents have endured, but those did not stick with me as much.
I honestly really dislike the blurb on the back from Juan Felipe Herrera. His description “this is the underground candy of the flower-stomper & mother-breaker” trivializes a brutal poem about rape (Rompe-madres is a character in "Narco"). Painting the world of "Lessons on Expulsion" as some sort of upside-down, carnivalesque world that delights in shocking the square folks is an oversimplification. Yes, it's shocking and, yes, it challenges our notions of what is and is not acceptable behavior, but it doesn't celebrate those things for their own sake. Sánchez pushes us out of our zones so that we will question how things have gotten to how they are, and whether they might need to change.
While his words may be less bombastic, I prefer Eduardo Corral’s description, which sits at the top of the back cover: “Sánchez makes visible the violence striking down Mexican women living on the border and interrogates the historical and the familial origins of misogyny. Her deft braiding of the beautiful and the grotesque infuses her language with a shimmering rawness and a startling immediacy.” This book is dealing with deep-seated issues, things stretching across generations and traditions--if we break with long-held conservativism, are we doomed to a world of "might is right"?
“Enjoy” is not the right word for my experience of this book, but it punched me in the face more than once and I will be thinking about it for quite some time. Sáchez’s voice is powerful.
May 20, 2018
This was a book that I really took my time to get through—six months, to be more exact. The reason for that? Very rarely, almost never, do I come upon any literature that I can relate to in such a complete sense. Written by Erika Sánchez, a daughter of Mexican immigrants born in the midwest (exactly like myself), Lessons on Expulsion is an exploration in rawness and vulnerability via poetry. I felt that I really needed to take my time with this. There are so many lines and stanzas that left me breathless with their commonality to my own experiences. Her writing is heady and intoxicating and so heavy with the her own dark history and suffering (and those of her ancestors) and yet she is unafraid to explore it and share it.
“487 years ago
people here crossed the ocean
and savagely fused with the inhabitants.
467 years later
my parents crossed the border
in the trunk of a Cadillac.
I was born in Chicago.”
“487 years ago
people here crossed the ocean
and savagely fused with the inhabitants.
467 years later
my parents crossed the border
in the trunk of a Cadillac.
I was born in Chicago.”
June 6, 2018
The collection is full of a range confessional poems—some s are so up-close that the reader feels like a voyeur: “we braid our bodies together/ on my twin bed. I dig my face into his beard… we eat two slippery eggs and drink coffee with frothy milk” (from “Lavapiés”). No matter the length of the focus, abstracted from time or in the moment, body imagery is used powerfully to texture and give vitality to the poems. In “Self-Portrait”, Sanchez writes, “My tongue grows plump/ as a greedy slug./ Again and again,/ an umbrella,/ opens inside me.” Bodies inside bodies inside the reader’s body. The power of Lessons on Expulsion—to confront history’s challenge. With lushness of phrasing and dynamic displays of body and joy and despair and hurt, Sanchez’s collection strikes like human natural disasters.
November 27, 2018
This book knocked my socks off. Raw, feminist, confessional with striking word combinations. To read this is to understand what it is to be of two cultures.
In Crossing, Sanchez starts with her parents immigration to the States and ends with the devastatingly beautiful lines to her mother: "I tell her how I want to understand the violence tangled in this tissue, the desert threaded in this flesh."
Best poetry book I've read all year. I shit you not!
In Crossing, Sanchez starts with her parents immigration to the States and ends with the devastatingly beautiful lines to her mother: "I tell her how I want to understand the violence tangled in this tissue, the desert threaded in this flesh."
Best poetry book I've read all year. I shit you not!
July 9, 2017
What's all the fuss about this collection for? These days it seems all it takes to be hailed as a poet is to string together some dark imagery from your deeply dysfunctional life (bonus points if you are from one marginalized group or another so that middle America can be delightfully shocked and awestruck by your wretched existence).
Be all that as it may, these aren't even particularly poetic. Meh...that's all...just 70 pages of meh. Oh, but I'm sure this work will be quite highly praised. So you ought to read it soon lest you miss the opportunity to say you "liked her poetry before it became popular."
Be all that as it may, these aren't even particularly poetic. Meh...that's all...just 70 pages of meh. Oh, but I'm sure this work will be quite highly praised. So you ought to read it soon lest you miss the opportunity to say you "liked her poetry before it became popular."
April 29, 2018
I give the cover art by Judithe Hernandez 5 giant gold stars.
Favorite lines:
“I call my mother to explain
how I scour landscapes, fold them
and keep them in a soft leather bag.
I tell her how I want to understand
the violence tangled in this tissue,
the desert threaded in this flesh.”
It wasn’t my all-time favorite book of poetry, but I found Sanchez’s use of both English and Spanish to be very effective. It seemed that many poems were hitting the same note, though. She is really great at creating startling images, but I don’t necessarily love that over and over.
Heads up: some rough language/images here
Favorite lines:
“I call my mother to explain
how I scour landscapes, fold them
and keep them in a soft leather bag.
I tell her how I want to understand
the violence tangled in this tissue,
the desert threaded in this flesh.”
It wasn’t my all-time favorite book of poetry, but I found Sanchez’s use of both English and Spanish to be very effective. It seemed that many poems were hitting the same note, though. She is really great at creating startling images, but I don’t necessarily love that over and over.
Heads up: some rough language/images here
January 2, 2019
Often raw and crude, this collection embodies a sense of purposelessness and loneliness, a search for one’s place in a violent, cruel world. “Ama, I leave because / I feel like an unfinished / poem, because I am always trying / to bridge the difference,” writes the poet in “Ama.”
I first dipped into “Lessons on Expulsion” a couple months ago but put it aside for awhile. I needed time and space to consider this challenging collection. These poems deserve slow reading and open minds. They confront and challenge ideas about family, place, and sexuality in stark images and allusions to beloved poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
I first dipped into “Lessons on Expulsion” a couple months ago but put it aside for awhile. I needed time and space to consider this challenging collection. These poems deserve slow reading and open minds. They confront and challenge ideas about family, place, and sexuality in stark images and allusions to beloved poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
July 17, 2017
Erika L. Sanchez has become one of my new favorite Latina poets. She writes about the experience of being Latina very accurately and almost relatable. She almost brings out a Sylvia Plath vibe in her poems, "Six months after contemplating suicide," and "The Poet at Fifteen." What I loved the most about her poetry was that the setting of the poems ranged from Mexico, the U.S., and Spain. It's wonderful to read Latina poets who include multicultural elements in their poems.
January 3, 2018
"...anything to smother the soft and constant vertigo, to stitch a spirit so riddled with leeches."
favorite poems:
- spring
- letter from new york
- lavapiés
- on the eve of the tepehuán revolt
- to you on my birthday
- crossing
- orchid
favorite poems:
- spring
- letter from new york
- lavapiés
- on the eve of the tepehuán revolt
- to you on my birthday
- crossing
- orchid
June 30, 2017
One of those collections where it feels like sparks flying from the author's brain to yours.
Read
July 28, 2023Despite the undeniably punchy contemporary style, the full effect of Sánchez's exploration of generational trauma, external and internalized racism, class struggle, and candid talk of suicide was somewhat undercut from the start upon opening the book to find, before one even reaches any of the poems, the bold corporate logos of Target and Wells Fargo and a nondescript statement about "other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals".
Careerism in the arts is a fraught, difficult enterprise which opens up the forum of defense, condemnation, and compromise, and it's near-impossible to find commercial success without appealing to some commercial powers. But Sánchez's efforts towards establishing her voice as a cutting-edge, polemic individual pushing against a cruel world is hard to connect with when her confessional is silently underscored by the shining stamp of corporate approval.
Careerism in the arts is a fraught, difficult enterprise which opens up the forum of defense, condemnation, and compromise, and it's near-impossible to find commercial success without appealing to some commercial powers. But Sánchez's efforts towards establishing her voice as a cutting-edge, polemic individual pushing against a cruel world is hard to connect with when her confessional is silently underscored by the shining stamp of corporate approval.
April 20, 2023
Always grateful to the librarians who display books so I will always discover new writers, how could I resist this cover? Excellent poetry.
March 21, 2021
Don't pick up this book if you're a beginner.
The poetry collection is quite mature and personal.
The poetry tends to get lost within the writing. Yes, it's poetry but I don't speak the language that's fitted in between the English words.
And I was a bit uncomfortable with the repetitive mention of the body parts and secretions. I know they are natural but I want enjoy poetry which ain't this.
But yes, this one is quite real.
The darkness and the hurt. And I didn't like the comparisons of what's "ugly" and "beautiful".
That's all.
The poetry collection is quite mature and personal.
The poetry tends to get lost within the writing. Yes, it's poetry but I don't speak the language that's fitted in between the English words.
And I was a bit uncomfortable with the repetitive mention of the body parts and secretions. I know they are natural but I want enjoy poetry which ain't this.
But yes, this one is quite real.
The darkness and the hurt. And I didn't like the comparisons of what's "ugly" and "beautiful".
That's all.
July 22, 2018
Unpleasant and ugly images are used so well here in a brutally honest collection of poetry that will kept me both uncomfortable and amazed.
My favorite excerpts (copied and pasted from my Kindle highlights, so I'm sure it will mess with formatting):
Some evenings you brim with the sky’s quiet bruising—
colors as beautiful as the spilled brains of a bird.
In your flamboyant despair, you fail to suck the sweetness from all that is good and holy. Watch the pigeons so lovely in their suffering! In the melted fat of the hour, a crust-punk chokes his dog in an empty park. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, the dog whimpers, licking the filth from his wounded feet.
Under the corpulent clouds, I feed the birds of my failures, so tenderly!
He drags his tongue along his teeth and remembers how easily a body dissolves in a vat of acid, how first, the flesh breaks away, how only the bones endure.
The day goes on picking the meat from its teeth.
Mercury, mandrake— I am only a girl with this brilliant black nest of eagerness.
Finally, when your plump little body wants what it wants, when you are bent in the arc of desire, you take a man inside your mouth in beautiful gulps of summer, until the shame clicks its way toward you like an ancient insect.
Now you say you’re a grown woman who can fuck her way across the world, if she wants. But when you wrap yourself around your man, when he yanks your hair the way you like, you still ask him to pretend as if you hold a beautiful rapture between your legs. You still ask him to pretend as if you’re human.
You will not work like us. You will not work like a donkey, my mother says in factory heat, the murmur of machines. My meek brother inside his bedroom reading The Grapes of Wrath, The Communist Manifesto, The Catcher in the Rye. He is a good son. Meanwhile, I carve my body with pre-Columbian numbers, dye my hair indigo, crimson, plot rebellion. I say conscience when I mean conscious. To the doctor I describe the pain as existential tumors. I say that the cuts are bloodletting. I cross the Atlantic like no one in my family ever has, to live among the civilized, drink wine, and read Cervantes.
This is bold—existing. You do not understand your parents who understand you less: your father who listens to ABBA after work, your mother who eats expired food. How do you explain what you have done? With your hybrid mouth, a split tongue. How do you explain the warmth sucking you open, leaving you like a gutted machine? It is a luxury to tell a story. How do you explain that the words are made by more than your wanting? Te chingas o te jodes. At times when you speak Spanish, your tongue is flaccid inside your rotten mouth: desgraciada, sin vergüenza.
Finally, you’ve learned to crawl inside the meat of your silence.
A man on the street tears the gold necklace from your mother’s neck— this is how you learn that nothing will belong to you. In your mangled language, you’ll count all the reasons you wish to die, the apartment bristling with roaches. Always the smell of corn oil. But what right do you have to complain about anything, with your clean socks and fat little stomach? Burnt pies from the thrift bakery you shove down your desperate gullet. What can you blame but your rootless eye? Your mind so soft and full of hysterical light. You’ve already learned that your body is a lie.
Love, remove your fingers from between my ribs. It’s true; I cup the grief as if it were milk, as if it were the last of water spilled. Quiet, you whistle in my brain like a balloon. What religion is this? Boredom in spring.
The poverty of love. Beads of blood. The children came like swarms of locusts: a constellation of sores on a baby’s face, a womb marked by nothing. In meager times, haughty women bequeathed her leftovers filled with napkins and toothpicks—dregs from their finest feasts. The bloody egg was more than a bad omen, they said. That night the wind smelled like wet copper. The diseased mare brayed in the loud suck of mud, and in her winged loneliness, Jacinta severed her braids and begged for the threat of miracles.
Watch how I shield my ears from the tiny blades of the cricket song, but I still love the way the evening rages on, its endless shriek of purple cloud.
My favorite excerpts (copied and pasted from my Kindle highlights, so I'm sure it will mess with formatting):
Some evenings you brim with the sky’s quiet bruising—
colors as beautiful as the spilled brains of a bird.
In your flamboyant despair, you fail to suck the sweetness from all that is good and holy. Watch the pigeons so lovely in their suffering! In the melted fat of the hour, a crust-punk chokes his dog in an empty park. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, the dog whimpers, licking the filth from his wounded feet.
Under the corpulent clouds, I feed the birds of my failures, so tenderly!
He drags his tongue along his teeth and remembers how easily a body dissolves in a vat of acid, how first, the flesh breaks away, how only the bones endure.
The day goes on picking the meat from its teeth.
Mercury, mandrake— I am only a girl with this brilliant black nest of eagerness.
Finally, when your plump little body wants what it wants, when you are bent in the arc of desire, you take a man inside your mouth in beautiful gulps of summer, until the shame clicks its way toward you like an ancient insect.
Now you say you’re a grown woman who can fuck her way across the world, if she wants. But when you wrap yourself around your man, when he yanks your hair the way you like, you still ask him to pretend as if you hold a beautiful rapture between your legs. You still ask him to pretend as if you’re human.
You will not work like us. You will not work like a donkey, my mother says in factory heat, the murmur of machines. My meek brother inside his bedroom reading The Grapes of Wrath, The Communist Manifesto, The Catcher in the Rye. He is a good son. Meanwhile, I carve my body with pre-Columbian numbers, dye my hair indigo, crimson, plot rebellion. I say conscience when I mean conscious. To the doctor I describe the pain as existential tumors. I say that the cuts are bloodletting. I cross the Atlantic like no one in my family ever has, to live among the civilized, drink wine, and read Cervantes.
This is bold—existing. You do not understand your parents who understand you less: your father who listens to ABBA after work, your mother who eats expired food. How do you explain what you have done? With your hybrid mouth, a split tongue. How do you explain the warmth sucking you open, leaving you like a gutted machine? It is a luxury to tell a story. How do you explain that the words are made by more than your wanting? Te chingas o te jodes. At times when you speak Spanish, your tongue is flaccid inside your rotten mouth: desgraciada, sin vergüenza.
Finally, you’ve learned to crawl inside the meat of your silence.
A man on the street tears the gold necklace from your mother’s neck— this is how you learn that nothing will belong to you. In your mangled language, you’ll count all the reasons you wish to die, the apartment bristling with roaches. Always the smell of corn oil. But what right do you have to complain about anything, with your clean socks and fat little stomach? Burnt pies from the thrift bakery you shove down your desperate gullet. What can you blame but your rootless eye? Your mind so soft and full of hysterical light. You’ve already learned that your body is a lie.
Love, remove your fingers from between my ribs. It’s true; I cup the grief as if it were milk, as if it were the last of water spilled. Quiet, you whistle in my brain like a balloon. What religion is this? Boredom in spring.
The poverty of love. Beads of blood. The children came like swarms of locusts: a constellation of sores on a baby’s face, a womb marked by nothing. In meager times, haughty women bequeathed her leftovers filled with napkins and toothpicks—dregs from their finest feasts. The bloody egg was more than a bad omen, they said. That night the wind smelled like wet copper. The diseased mare brayed in the loud suck of mud, and in her winged loneliness, Jacinta severed her braids and begged for the threat of miracles.
Watch how I shield my ears from the tiny blades of the cricket song, but I still love the way the evening rages on, its endless shriek of purple cloud.
September 29, 2019
Es un conjunto de tristes poemas sobre ser mujer e hija de inmigrantes ilegales, pero sobre todo sobre estar rota frente a un mundo sin demasiado sentido.
November 12, 2021
first i was: and now i’m: and before i was:
speeeeeeechless god this was so beautiful. i actually don’t know what to do with myself this collection was so amazing. GOD.
“What is God but an open mouthed stranger”
speeeeeeechless god this was so beautiful. i actually don’t know what to do with myself this collection was so amazing. GOD.
“What is God but an open mouthed stranger”
April 24, 2018
Violence, sex, lust, death, disappointment, depression, loss--Sanchez doesn't shy away from anything in this collection. She takes all that she inherits with open arms and tries to reconcile this with her self, which is sometimes "other" from this inheritance. Several poems address the hypersexualization foisted upon the speaker as a girl by strange men and by the speaker's mother. Several poems address the hideous violence present in some parts of Mexico due to drug trafficking.
These lines close "Las Pulgas":
how easily a body
dissolves in a vat
of acid, how first, the flesh
breaks away,
how only the bones endure.
"Why waste/time with metaphors? The body/is kindling." Sanchez writes in the poem "Forty-Three."
"A man on the street tears the gold/necklace from my mother's neck--/this is how you learn that nothing/will belong to you." she writes in "Girl."
These lines open "Hija de la Chingada": The men whistle from their trucks/though you're only 13 and your breasts//are still tucked/meekly inside you.
Sanchez is versed in Aztec gods and mythology (Tlaloc, Xolotl, Mictlan, and peoples such as the Tepehuan, Acaxee, and Xixime), and uses them to reimagine history and to inform the present.
There are also some beautiful, striking lines:
*The glittering women swing/their hips like eternal bells. (La Cueva)
*The desert thirst?/A lit branch/in your throat. (Portrait of a Wetback)
*Tomorrow/the queen will be picked clean/by the kindness of the sea. (Kingdom of Debt)
*In the bioluminescent bay, we are light itself, a glow so blue, the jelly of you quivers and quivers. Mosquitoes feast on our softest parts. / the green sunset strums the finest wires inside us. (Vieques)
*What I know best is the color of sun through my own eyelids. (Poem of My Humiliations)
In short, reading this volume broadened my world view and delighted my senses.
These lines close "Las Pulgas":
how easily a body
dissolves in a vat
of acid, how first, the flesh
breaks away,
how only the bones endure.
"Why waste/time with metaphors? The body/is kindling." Sanchez writes in the poem "Forty-Three."
"A man on the street tears the gold/necklace from my mother's neck--/this is how you learn that nothing/will belong to you." she writes in "Girl."
These lines open "Hija de la Chingada": The men whistle from their trucks/though you're only 13 and your breasts//are still tucked/meekly inside you.
Sanchez is versed in Aztec gods and mythology (Tlaloc, Xolotl, Mictlan, and peoples such as the Tepehuan, Acaxee, and Xixime), and uses them to reimagine history and to inform the present.
There are also some beautiful, striking lines:
*The glittering women swing/their hips like eternal bells. (La Cueva)
*The desert thirst?/A lit branch/in your throat. (Portrait of a Wetback)
*Tomorrow/the queen will be picked clean/by the kindness of the sea. (Kingdom of Debt)
*In the bioluminescent bay, we are light itself, a glow so blue, the jelly of you quivers and quivers. Mosquitoes feast on our softest parts. / the green sunset strums the finest wires inside us. (Vieques)
*What I know best is the color of sun through my own eyelids. (Poem of My Humiliations)
In short, reading this volume broadened my world view and delighted my senses.
September 7, 2025
One of the things I love the most about poetry is how the writer creates something but it's the reader who can interpret and feel every poem on their own way.
In this case, sadly, i didn't really get what's she trying to say with her poetry. I didn't feel the poems.
I do liked two poems: Hija de la chingada and Crossing.
In this case, sadly, i didn't really get what's she trying to say with her poetry. I didn't feel the poems.
I do liked two poems: Hija de la chingada and Crossing.
October 8, 2017
Poetry, poetry. Always something I’m either really into or something I’m completely indifferent toward. Erika L. Sánchez’s debut collection, Lessons on Expulsion is one I’m absolutely, without a doubt, very, very into. This is the kind of poetry I like: dark, a little despairing, very honest, super feminist, unapologetic about its Latinidad. 10/10 the content I’m here for.
Consider the closing section from “Hija de la Chingada,” a poem about sexuality, shame, mothers, and coming of age:
I was also struck by “To You on My Birthday,” about falling (in) out of love with someone at a young age, “A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring,” with the opening line “When I am a stranger to my own / ruin, twilight reminds me / to give alms to my best sins” which for some reason got me right where it hurts, and, of course, the final poem in the collection, “Six Months After Contemplating Suicide,” with its ever-apt observation that “to cease to exist / and to die / are two different things entirely.”
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Consider the closing section from “Hija de la Chingada,” a poem about sexuality, shame, mothers, and coming of age:
Now you say you’re a grown woman
who can fuck her way across the world,
if she wants.
But when you wrap yourself
around your man,
when he yanks your hair
the way you like,
you still asks him to pretend
as if you hold a beautiful rapture
between your legs.
You still ask him to pretend
as if you’re human.
I was also struck by “To You on My Birthday,” about falling (in) out of love with someone at a young age, “A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring,” with the opening line “When I am a stranger to my own / ruin, twilight reminds me / to give alms to my best sins” which for some reason got me right where it hurts, and, of course, the final poem in the collection, “Six Months After Contemplating Suicide,” with its ever-apt observation that “to cease to exist / and to die / are two different things entirely.”
📌 . Blog | Review Database | Twitter | Instagram | Goodreads
January 2, 2019
As I read this collection, I was very much aware that the poet is quite young; I mean, the poems feel like they are written by someone who doesn't have much experience in the world. There are, in my view, three kinds of poems that populate this book:
1. "love" poems that reflect the kind of dysfunctional love/lust relationships that seem normal to young women in their 20s and early 30s but are annoying, stupid, and boring to people ages 35 and above.
2. poems about important/appalling things happening in the world that are essentially based not on the author's experiences but on news articles she's read about these events. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but the poems themselves shouldn't feel like news articles; as a reader, you should feel involved in the world the poet paints, but if even she's not involved with it, how can a reader be?
3. poems that highlight language for language's sake, poems with lines like "Quiet, you whistle in my brain / like a balloon. / What religion is this? Boredom / in spring." These are the worst offenders, in my opinion, because you get the sense that the editor probably didn't even know what's going on in these messes of images but chose to publish the book anyway for its "fresh perspective" or whatever.
But mostly, these poems left zero impression on me. I flew through the book in one sitting and never thought about a single line after I read it. As another reviewer put it, this is a book of "meh." I just don't get all the hype.
1. "love" poems that reflect the kind of dysfunctional love/lust relationships that seem normal to young women in their 20s and early 30s but are annoying, stupid, and boring to people ages 35 and above.
2. poems about important/appalling things happening in the world that are essentially based not on the author's experiences but on news articles she's read about these events. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but the poems themselves shouldn't feel like news articles; as a reader, you should feel involved in the world the poet paints, but if even she's not involved with it, how can a reader be?
3. poems that highlight language for language's sake, poems with lines like "Quiet, you whistle in my brain / like a balloon. / What religion is this? Boredom / in spring." These are the worst offenders, in my opinion, because you get the sense that the editor probably didn't even know what's going on in these messes of images but chose to publish the book anyway for its "fresh perspective" or whatever.
But mostly, these poems left zero impression on me. I flew through the book in one sitting and never thought about a single line after I read it. As another reviewer put it, this is a book of "meh." I just don't get all the hype.
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