Patient Zero

Tomás Q. Morín

Tomás Q. Morín’s Patient Zero is full of life and its undeniable hungers. Claws, fins, and feathers, hands, mouths, and skin betoken animals with appetites, our world—in which a man in a crowded market becomes a tree of butterflies, a mountain gives a feline yawn, grocery bags contain “milk for bones—salt for blood.” At the edge of the fantastic, realism beckons: the buzzard stalks the tortoise, and each beginning contains its end.
 
Patient Zero
is about the end of love, yet Morín’s deadpan humor, love of language, and wild creativity remind us that both heartache and joy bring us to tears.

ISBN: 9781556594939

Format: Paperback

About the Author

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero. His debut poetry collection A Larger Country won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. He is co-editor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He is a writer-in-residence at Texas Tech University and teaches in the MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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“I will call the voice of this poet a ‘common’ voice… a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing.” —Philip Levine, Ploughshares