Sapello Son
Editors' Selection from the 2022 Frost Place Chapbook Competition
Fields of alfalfa turned into tufts of fire hazard from drought. The walls of a cold mobile home. A cut straw, stained ballcap, dirty carpets. These are the images that haunt Sapello Son, Alejandro Lucero’s lyric rekindling of a childhood in New Mexico and the landscape that consumed his parents. Lucero’s familiarity with the razor’s edge of choices foisted on those at the fringes keeps us teetering between profound devotion to family and sober recognition of the ways some families fail. Like its namesake, Sapello Son avoids sentimentality and refuses sympathy, asking us to reckon with the only things we’re born with: a place, a family, and a name.
Alejandro Lucero is a writer from Sapello, New Mexico. A 2022 June Fellow at the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, and former editor for Copper Nickel, his work can be found in publications such as The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, The Offing, and The Southern Review. He lives in Baltimore where he is an MFA student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an assistant editor for The Hopkins Review.
