Books of the Month
KADUPUL FLOWER: POEMS
Author: Kimberly Vargas Agnese
Publisher: Green Writers Press
ISBN-13: 978-08991413442 / ASIN: B0DWJ38RX9
SUMMARY:
Fresno, California, may be the nation’s breadbasket, but it is also a food desert to some who call it home. Summer temperatures find their niche in the triple digits, and resilience makes its name in the fields and on the streets . . . it pours from the mouths of the children. But dignity, all too often, comes with a price tag. The last $5.48 left on the food stamp card or the $200-plus it costs to ship over plant cuttings from Ecuador. Because even nature isn’t immune to commercialism. Peel back the price tags and recall the meaning of worth in Kadupul Flower, a social-environmental justice collection from debut poet Kimberly Vargas Agnese. Social and environmental justice converge in the intersectional work of Kadupul Flower. The poetry collection is distinctive in its uniting of several themes. The set deals with poverty – including homelessness – as well as racism, sexual assault, and ecological justice. The collection is, at its heart, about dignity, but the theme of dignity extends beyond the typical concept of ‘human’ dignity to encompass ‘environmental’ dignity, as well.
About the Editors:
Kimberly Vargas Agnese, author of Kadupul Flower, received Advance Praise endorsement from United States Poet Laureate Emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, Young Peoples Poet Laureate Emeritus Margarita Engle, and California State Poet Laureate Lee Herrick. Her debut collection makes its home on the shelves of the Firestone Library at Princeton University, as well as the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, among others.
Kadupul Flower appeared on the 2025 CLMP list for Hispanic Heritage Month, as well as new release lists from The Philly Chapbook Review, Latinx in Publishing, and Conchas.y.cuentos. During its opening months, the book achieved a third-place ranking on Amazon’s Hispanic American Poetry New Releases list and also ranked on the Hispanic American Poetry Bestseller list. The title was selected as the 2025 Book of the Month for the Nature Literature group on Goodreads and has been reviewed by various online outlets.
Kimberly makes her home in the smoggy California Central Valley. She spends her time cultivating a young food forest called Meadow Arc, praying, and writing advocacy poetry.
A former creative writing instructor, language arts educator, literacy coach, and special education teacher, Kimberly served as the founding editor of Jordan Journal. She has been welcomed into several venues for speaking and reading, including the 2025 Fresno Writers Summit and An Awakenings Foundation Reading Night, as well as A Book Barn of Clovis and the Clovis Library. Additionally, she has been invited to lead workshops at UC Merced, Sanger West High School, and the Fresno County Public Library.
Kimberly was recently spotlighted on Latino Book Review and The Asian Talks and also garnered a “Block Beat” mention on Fresnoland. She appears as a featured author on NativeAmericans.org and has been interviewed in Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Rappahannock Review, and Hotel by Masticadores.
Over forty of Kimberly’s poems, and two short stories, appear in sundry literary journals and anthologies, including Common Ground Review, Shift Magazine, Anacua Literary Arts Journal, and Unstamatic: Newsprint.
Kimberly’s full-length collection, Red String on a Saguaro Cactus, was named a finalist for the 2022 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, awarded biannually by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. To read more of her work, please visit www.kimberlyvargasagnese.com.
Website: https://kimberlyvargasagnese.com/
Instagram @kimberlyvargasagnese
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A BROWN MAN: POEMS
Author: Jose Hernandez Diaz
Publisher: Red Hen Press
ISBN-10: 1636282407 / ISBN-13: 978-1636282404
SUMMARY:
“What joys, what celebrations, and what tributes await the reader of Jose Hernandez Diaz’s Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man.”—Iliana Rocha, author of The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez
This collection consists of odes to the Mexican American, first-gen experience as well as surreal prose poems with cultural references and settings native to the Los Angeles area.
The collection opens with odes to everyday images and symbols of the Latinx community. In an age of elevated racism, these odes seek to celebrate Latinx culture in the face of constant scapegoating, ridicule, and surveillance. Also, this collection explores surreal prose poetry both in the suburbs and barrios of Los Angeles and the larger American landscape. “A future prizewinner,” according to former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, this collection seeks to celebrate the Mexican American experience while also exploring how surrealism and absurdism can lead to wondrous discoveries about the self, community, and the imagination.
About the Author:
“Jose Hernandez Diaz‘s poems cut through the modern acrobatics of the dazzling poetry parade in service of a straightforward and boldly honest approach. With cool constraint, he ‘abandons the hierarchies’ of language and chisels out the diamonds of our menial lives, ‘not for the ego’s sake, but for love.’ And because of this, we trust his witness, his testimony of the people and places that populate this worthy collection.”
—Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Some of the Light
“What joys, what celebrations, and what tributes await the reader of Jose Hernandez Diaz’s Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man. Through a voice of such intense clarity, Diaz utilizes both the ode and the prose poem as methods of defiance—pushing back against oppressive forces while creating poetic space for homage, as well as new, more nuanced histories; James Joyce, Lorca, Neruda, Holden Caulfield, José Emilio Pacheco, and Mrs. Weir, a high school English teacher, are just some of the literary cast of characters that are recontextualized in worlds that are surreal, at times absurd, and existential. The various speakers in the collection are in search for their sense of belonging while external forces constantly remind them of their otherness. Poetry. Poetry is where the speaker lands, finds his place, and invites us in. Ultimately, a directive in the midst of social and political unrest: ‘we must remember not to be loaded weapons aimed at each other.”
—Iliana Rocha, author of The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez
About the Author
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), and The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025). He has been published in the Yale Review, the London Magazine, and in the Southern Review. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program. He is from Norwalk, California.
