Published april 2022

Receta, the exciting debut collection by Mario José Pagán Morales, is a story of becoming a poet. This poet. Boricua and part of a proud tradition of Nuyorican poets before and around him. The expressive line breaks and easy movement between English and Spanglish are reflective of the poems' settings: the constant journeying of mind, spirit, and body to and from Guayanilla and Ponce, Puerto Rico, Philadelphia and New York City. The Bronx.

The title refers to a recipe, but the flavor expands beyond a single bite: the cocina is lovingly rendered, of course, and also the streets and sacred rivers and forests of Borikén. There is a generous heart behind these poems in which no one in the community is forgotten or judged harshly for being human. History amplifies the colonizer, but in striking, visceral imagery Morales invokes voices from the sites of struggle. Here, even the abandoned buildings and trash heaps speak, albeit in whispers, of lives that matter(ed).

Video: Mario José Pagán Morales performs “Origin Story”

praise for receta

With moving tenderness and fierce skill at the forefront of this powerful poetry collection, Mario José Pagán Morales crafts a powerful lyrical remembrance of the island of Borinkén and the vitality of the streets of Boricua Bruklin. In Receta, Pagán’s debut full-length poetry book, the readers will marvel at the gift of a visionary consciousness that traverses across space and time. In this transoceanic voyage, Pagán chronicles the lives of jíbaros in the island and títeres in the mainland, the hood savants of Nueva Yol, those equipped to survive the daily hustle in the city of dreams deferred en Español y en Spanglish. Full of echoes of the great masters Pedro Pietri and Miguel Piñero and the Nuyorican poets, Pagán code switches back and forth between English and Spanish, with the same ease as the protagonists of the Puerto Rican diaspora, who have found themselves inhabiting multiple worlds at the same time. Elegiac and playful, Mario Pagan’s collection alternates between a disarming sensibility and a decolonizing poetics of memory, one that challenges toxic models of masculinity present in Latinx cultures and centers the love of abuelas, daughters, hermanas and familia and their inspiring stories of resilience and resistance across centuries of colonization and ecological disasters.
—Violeta Orozco, author of “The Broken Woman Diaries”

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In his stunning poetic debut Receta, Mario José Pagán Morales captures the essence of diasporic joy and survival. Abuela’s ghost becomes a flavor that never leaves the tongue, a ritual that never leaves the body. Every poem is a prayer to ancestral wisdom. It is a gorgeous homage and necessary addition to the Nuyorican Arts movement.
—Elisabet Velasquez, author of “When We Make It”

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Receta, Mario José Pagán Morales’ debut collection of poetry, opens with the lines: “1980s cocinas pour slow / into sock strainer.” I am magically transported to my suegra’s kitchen in San Juan, the aroma of coffee heady as it trickles through a sock-shaped colador in an “ancestral ritual / passed down / from parents to children.” Mario takes us there: to the salas y cocinas of Borikén and the bodegas and street corners of New York. He introduces us to remarkable personajes that shaped both Puerto Rico’s and his own identity. He breaks our hearts with a Hurricane María poem, then soothes us with an invitation to taste his abuela’s pasteles, the recipe for which he’s “tattooed under [his] tongue.” Receta is a history lesson carved on the page with a machete, a feast enjoyed entre familia, a celebratory banquet I didn’t want to leave, even after I turned the last page.
—Susana Praver-Pérez, author of “Hurricanes, Love Affairs, and Other Disasters”

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Mario José Pagán Morales’ Receta is a series of prayers wrapped in coffee & patria. A collection of exquisite Bronx-Brooklyn slang, Spanglish mantras & island memory chants that’ll have you repeating everything by the end, pero be careful cause it might change your lengua. Observe him paying homage to Baba y la Casa, the Abuelas y los Títeres, Nueva Yol y Borikén & you’ll notice how it sounds like sunshine in the morning rain overlooking El Yunque & the Brooklyn Bridge.
— Bonafide Rojas, author of “Notes On The Return To The Island”

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Mario José Pagán Morales’ debut collection Receta speaks to our gente’s lives on the diasporic margins, where we are born with two and three tongues, and where magic is as essential as water. At the snap of a line break, you may take flight one thousand six hundred and twenty-five miles to be intrigued by characters you just met and felt you knew all your life. Pagán’s collection is a reflection of the dance with the lit angels, and our fights with the duende.
—Juan Papo Santiago, co-founder of Capicu Culture People’s Open Mic and LaSopa (School of Poetic Arts)

purchase

Receta is available for pre-order through our online store. Books will be shipped on publication date. We highly recommend purchasing directly through our online store, through our Bookshop.org page, or order through your favorite indie bookstore.

about Mario José Pagán Morales

Mario José Pagán Morales is a Nuyorican poet and cultural worker born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and raised in the South Bronx. His work is anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets, Volume 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Books, 2020), Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (great weather for MEDIA, 2019), and in the 2019 “The Performance of Breath” edition of The Acentos Review (edited by Peggy Robles-Alvarado and Lupe Méndez).

Pagán is a founding member of the Títere Poets, a collective of poets challenging the boundaries of masculinity and vulnerability. In addition, he is a Pushcart Prize nominee and co-founder of the La Esquina open mic, a series in service to the Latinx poetry community from coast to coast. He makes his home in Brooklyn, New York.

Mario José Pagán Morales, Receta

Publication date April 4, 2022

$20.00

ISBN: 979-8-9855633-0-6