Éric Morales-Franceschini’s Syndrome (Anhinga Press, January 2024) is a debut collection of poems selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry.
Description: Selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Syndrome scrutinizes the rhetoric and naked power by which Puerto Rico became an “unincorporated territory” and its peoples pathologized subjects. That Puerto Rico is the world’s oldest colony and “Puerto Rican Syndrome” a (formerly) codified disorder cannot, after all, be taken lightly.
Conjuring an ensemble of history, anecdotes, anthems, monuments, and statistics, this debut collection reckons with the collective traumas that haunt the Boricua psyche–a psyche vitiated by emancipatory desires as much as geopolitical travesties. In doing so, it strives to de-sublimate the effects of imperial power and enliven a politics for beauty and constituent power. Inventive, rigorous, and unyielding, Syndrome is nothing shy of a counter-diagnosis.
About the author: Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Tampa, Florida, Éric Morales-Franceschini is a former construction worker, US Army veteran, and community college graduate who now holds a PhD from UC, Berkeley and is Associate Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is author of the chapbook Autopsy of a Fall (Newfound 2021), winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the scholarly study The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation (University of Virginia Press, 2022), winner of the MLA’s 2023 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. Syndrome, selected by US Poet Laureate emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, is his debut full-length collection.
For more information, see https://www.anhingapress.org/poetry/syndrome-by-ric-morales-franceschini?category=Philip%20Levine%20Prize
Also see review at https://www.fresnostatenews.com/2023/02/02/georgia-author-wins-2022-philip-levine-prize-for-poetry/
Éric Morales-Franceschini’s Syndrome (Anhinga Press, January 2024) is a debut collection of poems selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Description: Selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Syndrome scrutinizes the rhetoric and naked power
