Why I Am Like Tequila is one of the most exciting books to come out in years. Mendez takes us on a wild ride from birth, to family, to community, with a master's control of language and with gritos that sing and yawp and cry from the rooftops of the Americas. Unpredictable, imaginative, necessary, these poems introduce us to an important new poet for our generation.
--Daniel Chacón, Author of Hotel Juarez
Why I Am Like Tequila is all "beautiful blue / maguey veins" stretching along the Gulf Coast, where borderlands and littorals meet. Indigenous Tejanx consciousness digs deep beneath the dystopian headlines (hurricanes, immigration officers) and finds "a million interconnected howls," in raw, cleansing songs about fathers, elders, lovers, neighbors, and children (the only, the never born, the never dead). Against Keats, Lupe Méndez seeks out a translingual beauty-truth ("inside I wanted el toque de luz") and insists on those untranslatable moments "when tongue slurs" and language "jettisons / out into the gulf." From found poetry to a Spanish pantoum, Méndez's writing performs "the act of island" where "I hold myself against this want" and we "dig dance move" with him. This is poetry about the contradictions of contemporary Brown masculinity and its discontents, about our island-cities and their archipelagos, about the blessings and curses of familia; in other words, urgent reading. With its heart of agave ("Mi corazón es un mezontle"), this book is firmly rooted in an expanded frontera, full of love and libations for our Américas.
--Urayoán Noel, Author of Buzzing Hemispheres/Rumor Hemisférico
