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Dream of the Bird Tattoo
Poems and Sueñitos
Published by UNM Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
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Table of Contents
About the Book
Winner of the 2026 Reading the West Award for Poetry
From the author of The Handyman's Guide to End Times comes a new poetry collection celebrating the life and grieving the death of Morales's father.
In this brilliantly rendered collection—the author’s fourth—Juan J. Morales explores love and grief after the death of his father. Morales weaves his father’s personality, his childhood in Puerto Rico, and his service in the US military with his own interest in life after death. In these poems he guides the reader through ghost hunts, conversations with mediums, a series of dreams in which he and his father work through his father’s crossing over together, and his ultimate acceptance of this monumental loss. Dream of the Bird Tattoo beautifully showcases how our loved ones continue to live on in our memories and actions.
From the author of The Handyman's Guide to End Times comes a new poetry collection celebrating the life and grieving the death of Morales's father.
In this brilliantly rendered collection—the author’s fourth—Juan J. Morales explores love and grief after the death of his father. Morales weaves his father’s personality, his childhood in Puerto Rico, and his service in the US military with his own interest in life after death. In these poems he guides the reader through ghost hunts, conversations with mediums, a series of dreams in which he and his father work through his father’s crossing over together, and his ultimate acceptance of this monumental loss. Dream of the Bird Tattoo beautifully showcases how our loved ones continue to live on in our memories and actions.
Product Details
- Publisher: UNM Press (February 18, 2025)
- Length: 136 pages
- ISBN13: 9780826367594
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Raves and Reviews
"Morales creates a living tribute to his Boricua Papo and connects this lineage to the roots he has established in the Mountain West."
– Shelli Rottschafer, Rocky Mountain Reader
"Dream of the Bird Tattoo depicts the interplay of the personal and the social in its vision of grief for a parent, and it does so movingly and with powerful softness. It is in the structure, though, where the collection really shines, using the speculative frame of the dream to unfold the possibilities of the prose poem as a means of thinking through the world in which we live and write."
– Tristan Beiter, Strange Horizons
"Dream of the Bird Tattoo asks us to sift through pieces of a life, assembling a portrait, accompanying those who keep searching in order to not let go."
– Emily Pérez, RHINO
“With Dream of the Bird Tattoo, Juan J. Morales has created a stunning memoir-in-poems about his father’s death and the grief that follows. This collection is honest, powerful, and heartbreaking.”
– Sean Prentiss, author of Crosscut: Poems
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