Cruel Fiction brings together new material with celebrated work published here for the first time in book form, including the provocative and charged "Brazilian Is Not a Race," a sonnet sequence meditating on race, nation, and history seen from the author's native Rio Grande Valley; it also includes widely-circulated "128-131," a caustic, hilarious, tender account memorializing three days in jail during the Occupy movement, one of the many insurgencies that provide the context and kinesis of this powerful collection. This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle through our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle.
“Wendy Trevino is my leader in craft. Cruel Fiction is my courage before a county judge. Born captive, I am inspired to at least take back my likeness. Against industrialists who know that in fire we are at home. One more poem could put the ghetto on the brink of irreversible rebellion. The continuum of slave fields will all know justice and Trevino has a proletariat story for every city this side of 2008.” —Tongo Eisen-Martin, California Book Award 2018, American Book Award 2018
"Interweaving colonial and personal history, Wendy Trevino's deceptively plainspoken poems carry readers back to an unsettled past where unity is not a precondition for concerted political action, but a product of it. Alert to such possibilities illuminated by an upsurge of radical social movements across the globe, these are wonderfully and militantly untimely poems." —Chris Chen, The New Inquiry
"Trevino's valiant collection is a must read" —Poetry Foundation Book of the Year 2016, for "Brazilian Is Not a Race"
Wendy Trevino was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. She lives in San Francisco, where she shares an apartment with her boyfriend, friend & two senior cats. She has published chapbooks with Perfect Lovers Press, Commune Editions and Krupskaya Books. Brazilian no es una raza - a bilingual edition of the chapbook she published with Commune Editions - was published by the feminist Mexican press Enjambre Literario in July 2018. Cruel Fiction is her first book-length collection of poems. Wendy is not an experimental writer.
