Your Best American Mii

Lorenzo Barajas's poems soak up pleasure to drool it back out. Slipping out of a sweaty dress, he leaves a love trail to follow in the morning. Fantasy sidles up to the obvious, where Barajas knows gratitude is foraged, not bought: It's there if you know how to look for it. These poems say love is what gets you inside, and inside is a space the size of the world.-Charles Theonia Look, all I should really have to say is Lorenzo Barajas's poems reach the elusive poetic trifecta: funny, vulnerable, insightful. Some of y'all take note! This is how to lighten the load of the poem. These do what simple humor cannot: expose the soft heart beating underneath any laughing chest. You will be glad to be gay after reading these, glad to shoulder those burdens knowing this exit from normal life is an opening to wider tenderness and so wider pain but also wider love. Glad to know the future of poetry is equally casual and profound. -Nora Treatbaby Lorenzo's work is nothing if not transformative. He moves between conversational & confessional registers on a dime, treating even the most ordinary encounter like a momentous occasion worth interrogating, commemorating, paying real attention to. Lorenzo's poem's are infinite nesting dolls-steel girders sprouting up out of themselves bone after bone until at last the whole structure looms ahead-open, welcoming, & always strange. -C. (Constantine Jones)