Unaccompanied

New York TimesBestselling Author of SolitoEvery line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans.Jamaal MayZamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life. GlappitnovaJavier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.From Let Me Try Again:He knew we weren't Mexican.He must've remembered his familycoming over the border, or the bordercoming over them, because he drove usto the border and told us next time, restat least five days, don't trust anyone callingthemselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines,Alhambra. He knew we would try again.And againlike everyone does.Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 20162018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.