Flower Grand First

by Gustavo Hernandez

Gustavo Hernandez’s debut poetry collection, Flower Grand First, moves through the complex roads of immigration, sexuality, and loss. These poems are points plotted on maps both physical and emotional—the rural landscapes of Jalisco, the glimmering plains of memory, the busy cities of California, and the circular paths of grief. Hernandez’s stunning elegies float along a timeline spanning three decades, honoring family, recording a personal history, and revealing a vulnerable but resilient voice preoccupied with time, place, and what is left behind out of necessity.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

Published March 22, 2021

Reviews

[BookChampions · Rating 5 out of 5]

"At the bus stop in plaid shorts / and a Tori Amos t-shirt, palming / a high school collage of black / and white Versace ads, hungry // and buoyant, I was a probable answer."

Gustavo Hernandez's first full collection of poems is an amalgam of memory stitched into the contours of a human heart. From poet Carl Phillips, I've learned that mystery can be a sort of poetic device---the way poets leave poems open or gapped for readers to fall into. Hernandez is a master of this poetic mystery.

These poems are sensory and call upon elemental forces; they place the reader in a boy's memories of summers in Santa Ana, California and Jalisco, Mexico. Of father and mother and sister. Of music. And of border crossing---between childhood and becoming a man, between nations, between past and present, and present and future.

This collection, *Flower Grand First*, also reverberates with the meaning one finds in the relationships we have with our families, how they make us and how they leave us or we leave them: "my family was a doorway / expanding, whole, all tomorrows."

Although my memories take place in a much different locales than Hernandez --- suburban Chicago, the Dogwood lined banks of the Mississippi, and the lonely streets of a town of 1000 people on the thin border between Illinois and Wisconsin --- it was easy for me to understand what Hernandez is doing here.

I know what it is like to be "a new body prying the slick door / open between dimensions, filling / a black ceiling with a prayer-smoke image, / an inversion." I have learned, too, to "trust / my body, my tongue and its brutish but deft curiosity."

Part Two was my absolute favourite part of the book, but I needed all of these poems in my life, to fall into.

[Darla · Rating 5 out of 5]

How appropriate that the first word of this book’s title is “Flower,” because it is, in so many ways, an archive of blooming: into grief, into tenderness, into masculinity and queerness and sexuality, into life in two languages, into a geography that reaches from Jalisco to Santa Ana. “One of my vocabularies / compliantly hides under the other,” the poet writes in “California,” though many vocabularies bloom in Flower Grand First—including the vocabulary of ancestors and the beloved departed. The collection’s final poem is “The Hereafter,” of which, the poet writes, “It will always be Jalisco. / I will just go out and say it. Say / that the eyes of those who are mine / adjust not to an ascent / as much as a return.”

I have been reluctant to put Flower Grand First down, as reading it has also comforted the heart in me that misses Southern California and its astonishing flora, so much of which is catalogued in these pages. It has me looking up pictures of tuberose, closing my eyes to conjure eucalyptus trees.

Again and again, I return to these poems. Hernandez’s voice is compelling—yes: queer, immigrant, and also: lyric, narrative, music, pleasure, cleverness, beauty, memory, loss, bravery, specificity, community, family, devotion. There is so much muscle and heart in these poems.

[Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of my favorite lines:

“I want your light to cross-cut into me to show them that my favorite thing about this place is that my father brought me here.” (p. 18)

“But you’re sleeping, warm under your own weight, breathing out your own significance.” (p. 59)

“My family was a doorway expanding, whole, all tomorrows.” (p. 60)

“We must try to hold on to everything we can still recognize, even the need to look for our fathers in the sky.” (p. 65)

“Look how far you’ve come, drunk with three cities in your mouth” (p. 70)

[Jo Reyes-Boitel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book - I would not have thought this was the author's first full-length book. I appreciated the mix of themes (loss, migration, sexuality, time/space, place, family) that moves back and forth without concern for a chronological order. Instead, poems are placed in proximity of each other to create a new kind of awareness and dialogue between the pieces. I adore the poems, the author's loving, fully-engaged approach. I highly recommend this book!

[Megan Erickson · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some interesting poems, but it felt unnecessarily edgy, which I think comes with the territory of poetry. Maybe I just don't like poetry. "Carmen," "A Bad Birthday Dediction," and "Simpson-Mazzoli" are an interesting read that delve into further discussion, but it isn't much of my thing.

[Cosimo Giovine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure all the poems are vivid and honest, but "Flor De Albacar I" and "Flor De Albacar II" are heartwarming and healing.

[Garrett Hurley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed gleaning Gustavo’s perspectives on living, home, family, and place through this collection. A lot of really meaningful poems I will be coming back to