The Lost Nostalgias

Coming May 6th, 2025!
***Orders will begin shipping by the final week of April.***

With a narrative voice that renders the seemingly unforgettable lyrical, The Lost Nostalgias once again demonstrates Esteban Rodríguez’s exploration of familial moments that move between the tragic, the trivial, and the triumphant. A mother’s decaying teeth leads to questions of self-care and beauty. A quinceañera becomes a meditation on masculinity. A visit to the bank illuminates a father’s existential fears. And a rave suddenly becomes a reflection on migration and survival. Because nothing is off the table under Rodríguez’s tender lens, everything and everyone becomes deserving of admiration, dignity, and love.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. He lives with his family in south Texas.

from Shaved

[My mother] shaved my head, and to emphasize

the punishment, slapped the back of it,
so I’d remember how not to behave

again, so when I was on my high horse,
convinced I owned the world,

I’d remember how it feels
when what I love is gone.

from Bury

No, my father bought nothing else

at the garage sale that day,
and at home, with the club in his hand,

he stood in the middle of the yard,
swung at nothing again and again,

until something within him said
he should hit every empty beer can,

and after sending them into the driveway
or street, he should swing at what

had long be ignored: rusted nails,
chunks of wood, small car parts

my father had tossed, saying,
if only to himself, that he was going

to use them someday, only that day
never came, and instead this one

found him swinging, so suddenly,
harder, harder, hoisting the club

over his head, and with all his strength,
smashing the ground till he made a hole…

“What is paradise but the history we never see,” Esteban Rodríguez asks as the son of Mexican immigrants, a father who labors through “a decade of construction sites, // sixty-hour work weeks … bearing / the bright beatings from the sun,” and a mother who struggles with a new language: “Where does she land when it comes to // the words that haven’t found refuge / in her mouth.” In meticulously crafted and emotionally restrained couplets and tercets, Rodríguez assembles a self, not only of the body—teeth, hair, tongue—but also of the “frayed and familiar fabric” of the past, the “prayers and prayer candles placed / in bowls of water beneath the bed.” Out of all the “beautiful waste” of America, Rodríguez constructs, finally, a home, “a world I imagine / one day will believe in me.” The Lost Nostalgias is an intimate and affecting sequence of poems—“why not infer a narrative”—which details how one family’s assimilation rewards us all.
—Michael Waters, author of Sinnerman

Esteban Rodríguez’s fervent poetry collection, The Lost Nostalgias, peels back surfaces and asks us to bear witness. Poems grapple with displacement between cultures, languages, and identities—knowing “wherever he went some would stare, / some would look away”—zooming in and out of the tender and acheful nostalgia of growing up Mexican American in this country: “Pain can make anyone / a different person.” Here, the brutality of racialization, the refugee experience, and a colonized language makes a person become thinner versions of themselves. Son and father endure absence, violent providings, and the compounding weight of toxic masculinity. Language—its breaking and its stitching—are at the epicenter of these poems, how they hold familial relationships, memories, and evolutions. The narrator seeks refuge in undoing youthful lamentations of wielding English as a weapon to reclaim his diasporic lineage and believe his father’s words, “in the right hands, the most broken things / could be repaired.” Rodríguez’s book is an honoring of migrant family fortitude and the insistence of the human spirit.
—Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones

98 pages
Esteban Rodríguez
Pub date – May 2025
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN:978-1-960327-11-6
Notable Voices in Poetry