1 1

Brooklyn Poets

Party Line by Kyle Carrero Lopez

Party Line by Kyle Carrero Lopez

$17.00
$17.00
Sale Sold out

“Lopez’s deceptively breezy lyrics undercut assumptions about queer, Cuban, and American cultures as his speaker rubs shoulders with intellectuals, artists, and activists amid gossipy chatter and hardcore discourse. . . An urgently timely, eye-opening, and incandescent collection.”—Diego Báez, Booklist (starred review)

I walk up to a party I didn’t pay to attend since I’m on the list. The gays throwing it craft lengthy manifestos on community care and the impermissibility of all“-isms” within the space and charge fifty to eighty at the door. You, too, can cruise utopia nightly for the price of one disposable income. The money you have and the people you know: two ropes. A climb to safety, or a bind round the neck.

—From “Public Policy”

Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the United States and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they have othered.

The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are apolitical or purely escapist, revealing unexpected connections between individuals’ actions and those of the state. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.

Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.
View full details