The Book of Flight

José Angel Araguz

José Angel Araguz’s The Book of Flight is a chapbook of aphoristic, fragmentary writings in the style of Ramon Gomez de la Serna’s greguerías and Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions. Described by Misha Pam Dick as “a four-part microtreatise-poem. Like aphorisms that don’t preen, or fragments that don’t mourn,” The Book of Flight lives somewhere between the insight of haiku, the personal heat of tanka, and the everyday tone of a poet’s notebook.

“In the book of flight, plastic bags are brought in to do the work of clouds.

Dead leaves rest in the margins.

Grass clippings, eyelashes, fingernails: errata in the book of flight.”

Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, JOSÉ ANGEL ARAGUZ is a CantoMundo fellow. Winner of Rhino Poetry’s 2015 Editor’s Prize, he has had poems recently in Prairie Schooner, Borderlands and Huizache. He is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Author of the collection Everything We Think We Hear, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence.