Drum the Double Sun—Algoems

Description

Drum the Double Sun—Algoems

poems by Daniel Manuel Mendoza
ISBN: 978-1-963695-19-9 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-20-5 ebook $9.99

April 15, 2025

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Drum the Double Sun—Algoems is a book of poems that provides a tour of surrealist portraits of the working-class through the barrooms, cafes, apartments, motels, and highways of South Texas and the Midwest. These “algoems” range from prophetic lyricism to absurdist poems of social and political protest, incorporating the symbols and metaphors of Aztec philosophy and western art. Through childhood to adulthood, Daniel Manuel Mendoza seeks to gain a closeness with the reader as he peers deep into the heart of what it means to be a Chicano poet in the 21st century.

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Praise for Drum the Double Sun—Algoems by Daniel Manuel Mendoza

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In Daniel Manuel Mendoza’s America, sons find freedom in fathers whose forearms are “soiled with engine grease,” philosophers seek virtue in the “legs of working women,” and wanderers contemplate the nature of love in “city streets weighted / In loss and the choked promises / Of the past.” The sense of an ending is always near, rearing its head around every half-empty street corner, every somnambulant neighborhood, every desolate highway, and yet, Mendoza never demands pity from his readers. Rather, through measured lyricism, candid tones, and a multitude of voices infused with the symbolic, we discover a joyful meditation of the lives of those too often neglected and unjustly forgotten. From Chicago to all along the border of the Rio Grande Valley, Drum the Double Sun is as ripe with “sleep and cigarettes” as it is with hearts as “heavy / As a smash of doves.” Once you traversed the end of Mendoza’s debut collection, hauling the exhumed remnants of memory, you will realize that if you truly want to cleanse your soul, you must first be willing to get your hands dirty.

—Esteban Rodríguez, author of Lotería

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Daniel Manuel Mendoza’s collection of “algoems” is offbeat, in tune, formidable. It’s a robust investigation and inventory of a life lived in the dust of South Texas and bearing the imprint of different American cities—Chicago, D.C., Denver—and even ancient Mexico. It’s singular, strange, beautiful. Mendoza makes it breathe, makes the reader feel alive, too, which is what it’s all about. You’ll find it hard to put down.

—Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand

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Daniel Mendoza’s poetry collection feels good to me. I’m excited to hold it in its bookish form, as I’ve been reading it on a little phone, held in my hands—a new bird, a new egg—this is a collection to be wrapped up with, and to hunker down on. Take for instance Mesquite. It’s there in its squelch and smoke. Imagine if you could, a Mexica Lily. Can you taste the soft petals of its mouth!? Possibly try to feel the tarmac swinging beneath a car in the desert, beneath the wheels, hanging low and beating underneath you. These are present in this book. The manuscript feels like a sacred grocery list, or the names of your most distant ancestors come home to you. I’m in love with the strangeness, and the angelic qualities. To finally hold it in my hands! This is the kind of book that you stay up late one night for, sewing a quilted envelope to slide it in, to warm it, to protect it. A Brilliant book. Bravo!

—Linda Ravenswood, award-winning author of a poem is a house

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Daniel Manuel Mendoza was born in Hammond, Indiana, and raised in Hebbronville, Texas. He is the author of Stray Dogs: Interviews with Working-Class Writers (Down & Out Books, 2016). His work has appeared in Boulevard, Pleiades, and Alchemy, among others. He lives in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.