“An outstanding and important collection that brilliantly captures the emotional complexities, tensions, and traumas of exile and assimilation, all rendered with exquisite lyrical clarity and masterful metaphors. These poems are an essential read for all hyphenated Americans sifting through layers of culture, language, memory—and much more—to find the essence of our true being.” —Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet

“What does America mean to a first-generation American? What future is expected from the child of parents who sacrificed it all to come to this complex and unrelenting country? In Crossing the Hyphen, Madari Pendas grapples with the ways in which white colonial oppression seeps into everything–the tongue, the skin, the mind, the heart, even the bonds of a family. In powerful and exacting poems that move through family history, personal discovery and political identity, Pendas shows us what really lives inside the hyphen.”–Ashley M. Jones, Poet Laureate of Alabama

Crossing the Hyphen, a luminous, incisive, and polyvocal debut by Madari Pendas, inspects identity prismatically: the speaker’s lived reality as a Cuban-American alongside the lives of her immigrant parents alongside the complex lineage that precedes their family: “My ancestors/ Lost hands/Over gold,” she writes, and later, “I must be another/ Piece of gold/ Resting on their chest.” Pendas’s poems are “bomblets” and “strung-out pearls.” This book embodies that paradox. This book is a striking jewel.

—Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted: Poems and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing