Diaries of a Terrorist
Sexy, outspoken, and explosive, the terrorist of Soto’s debut collection resists police violence with linguistic verve and radical honesty.
This debut poetry collection demands the abolition of policing and human caging. In Diaries of a Terrorist, Christopher Soto uses the “we” pronoun to emphasize that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities. His poetics open the imagination towards possibilities of existence beyond the status quo. Soto asks, “Who do we call terrorist, & why”? These political surrealist poems shift between gut-wrenching vulnerability, laugh-aloud humor, and unapologetic queer punk raunchiness. Diaries of a Terrorist is groundbreaking in its ability to speak—from a local to a global scale—about one of the most important issues of our time.
Christopher Soto (he/they) is a poet from Los Angeles, California, who also goes by the name Loma. They work at UCLA with the Ethnic Studies Centers and sit on the Board of Directors for Lambda Literary. A 2019 CantoMundo fellow, they are the author of the chapbook Sad Girl Poems and the editor of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color.
