I have read a lot of poetry collections recently and this definitely ranks among my favorites. The writing is incredibly warm and lyrical and the poems are both fun and meaningful. I tabbed so many poems and specific lines and I am not normally one to annotate my books!

I also really love that if you flip the book over you get the whole collection in Spanish!

Highly recommend this one, especially if you're interested in more diverse poetry.

This collection of poems is excellent! All different types of love are highlighted here. The author has an incredible way with language. As a Latinx reader, I felt especially seen and represented in this collection which is always a wonderful feeling. I think this would make a great gift for someone for the holidays or a special occasion.

I don't know how to properly rate this, because I think my expectations were unfairly set based on the forward. I was expecting more--a more thorough exploration of love for one's friend and a few serious poems about progressive politics. I don't know if I would have had such high hopes if the forward didn't resonate with me so hard. I am a fan of Jose Olivarez and his style. I think I would have liked this more if I had went in without expectations.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for approving me for the arc after publication. I enjoyed the author's collection of poems. No complaints here, and I will be rereading the poems throughout my lifetime and I will be recommending on my bookstagram account. The author talks about his experiences as a Mexican-American and it's all beautifully written.

this collection was just fantastic, and i'm not surprised. Olivarez knows how to bring the every day life that he and his family and community experiences into poetry that is engaging, fun, moving and meaningful.

José Olivarez’s latest poetry collection, Promises of Gold, is “a book of love poems for the homies,” written amid a global pandemic that has left us raw and exposed to all the other forces that we constantly live through every day. Published this February, Olivarez celebrates love in all forms—familial, fraternal, and sometimes fleeting.

Originally from Calumet City, Olivarez is a poet, educator, and performer. His first poetry collection Citizen Illegal explored themes of immigrant identity, family, politics, and Chicago nostalgia. After its success, Olivarez released Promises of Gold while wrestling with the legacy of colonialism and capitalism and how to keep love alive.

Olivarez began writing Promises of Gold in 2019, with some of the book’s earlier poems published as early as 2013. The collection’s title and its chapter names call back to the shorthand of “Gold, God, and Glory” which spurred Spanish colonizers toward extraction, eradication, and enslavement in Mexico and Spain’s new imperial conquests.

In Promises of Gold, Olivarez stylistically draws on Spanish colonial imagery and the language of empire for the book’s structure, but he also uses them to echo the process of undoing colonial harm. “What is gold to us? What is holy to us? Where do we find glory?” Olivarez asks us in the forward of his latest collection.

Promises of Gold is a post-pandemic collection through and through—filled with class anxieties and righteous resentment toward the rich and powerful. In one of his poems,“It’s Only Day Whatever of the Quarantine & I’m Already Daydreaming About Robbing Rich People,” Olivarez fantasizes about punching Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the face and living long enough to punch him again.

“I think it resists empire by resisting the way that empire wants to make all books functional,” Olivarez said in an interview with the Weekly. “It’s not an anti-racist book…it doesn’t have a diversity, equity, inclusion type of purpose. It’s useful, maybe only for those of us that are interested in organizing.”

Many of Promises of Gold’s more economically-stressed poems stem from wanting to be more direct about class. “When I wrote Citizen Illegal, I thought class identity was a big part of those poems. And I found that…mostly the conversations that people were interested in having with me were about identity, belonging, and family,” Olivarez said.

In writing these poems, Olivarez wanted to capture the way class and financial insecurity have shaped his own life. There is a blunt anger spinning through the pages—from the promise of upward mobility, what the rich do to be paid first, and learning how to adjust to having money but always feeling the anxiety of money problems.

“I was talking with a friend the other day, and I was like, ‘there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t feel stressed out, looking at my bank account. It doesn’t matter how much money I have. I don’t know [if] that kind of insecurity will ever go away,” Olivarez said.

Laid throughout Promises of Gold is an attempt to understand how artists make art that resists empire, but they can also be absorbed within empire—critique, commentary, and all. “American Tragedy” puts this front and center:

“…it is easier to listen to an artist outside detention capable of
spinning the secret into a coin, we can share at a dinner party where everyone will sigh & look
contemplatively that’s their part in this american tragedy”

Following that, “Poem with a Little Less Aggression” characterizes audiences and the state as implicit in the violence and consumption of capitalism, even the artist who clarifies before his critique, “when i am invited/ to the halls of wealth…i take my seat/ i snap a flick/ i pose with all my teeth showing/ how harmless/ i am.”

“…i can’t help the poor if i’m one of them says the billionaire. i can’t help the poor if i’m one of
them says the banker signing off on my family’s foreclosure. it’s true, you know: there is no ethical
consumption under capitalism. some truths are useless.”

“Having been a little bit more celebrated by different poetry and cultural institutions, just seeing how those organizations and those institutions can champion a certain type of political stance, [but] at the same time, they can turn around and accept donations and money from the grossest people on the planet,” Olivarez added.

“Part of what I’m trying to do is just remain vigilant and maybe even suspicious of myself in some ways, trying to stay grounded in remembering that all of that stuff is transient. What matters is not necessarily that type of institutional support, but writing poems in community with people that are struggling against empire is a way that I would phrase it.”

In his author’s foreword and while talking to him, Olivarez often refers to his poems as attempts—to make beauty out of a situation or create space for imagining something different. “Some poems are failed attempts in a way. They can’t actually undo the harm they’re trying to undo. They can’t actually rescue the moment they’re attempting to illustrate or show or reveal.” There is a tension in making the ugly and complicated, beautiful, but Olivarez thinks of writing as attempts to hold the temporary nature of these moments and let them live longer.

“I write a lot about family and about possible lives of family members…and I write a lot about my family who has passed away. In some ways, the poems are most beautiful to me when they can hold those people,” Olivarez said. “It’s this imaginary space that I create in the poems, and at the end of the poem, those spaces disappear into the ether. To me, the beauty continues to exist even when they do fold up into the ether because it makes it so that I can continue the conversation just a little bit longer.”

In the poem, “An Almost Sonnet for My Mom’s Almost Life,” Olivarez crafts a life that could have been for his mother had she not had children.

“…she spends her twenties following Marco Antonio Solís show
to show. hands up in surrender. in praise to a different god
than the one she spends Sundays kneeling to now i love imagining
Her like this: her name Maria, Maria a name the men curse
To the heavens from Guadalajara to Oaxaca. the holy name of the mother
reborn a mother to none..”

In this almost-alternate reality, she chases musician shows and takes care of only herself. The poem remarks she would protest if she heard this, but it keeps wondering what her life would be like with a life all her own. In writing, Olivarez fills in the gaps of silence between himself and aspects of his mother that he simply cannot know.

“One of the big revelations for me is, my parents growing up would talk to me about the sacrifices they made for me and my siblings, which made me think that they always carried some amount of sadness, or longing for the life that they left,” Olivarez said. “But my mom always made sure to tell me, ‘I’m not sad about the choices that I’ve made. This is my life. And this is the life that I wanted, and I chose it.’ In that same poem, there’s this point where she pushes back in [and] says that her life would be boring without family and without God, which is how my mum would really…that’s like what she says.”

Throughout the collection, Olivarez navigates loneliness, wistfulness, and heartbreak in ways both tangible and new. “Poetry Is Not Therapy,” as he titles one poem, yet its first line answers, “but that doesn’t mean i didn’t try it.”

But Promises of Gold is filled with tongue-in-cheek humor, much of which comes from how Olivarez writes. Olivarez starts by imagining his three younger brothers and writing a poem they would like. “It’s important to me that they don’t feel excluded from the poems, that if they want to read them, they can,” he said.

While emotional and heavy, the book shines at its most when it’s wavering between silly and sincere, earnest and amusing. In public readings, audiences are between laughter and still silence. “I think humor adds a very particular texture to poetry that is useful. It can help give it some spark and fire and animate them in a way,” he said.

In Promises of Gold, the lyrical comes to life in the everyday—whether the reader is laughing alone with the book or listening to his spoken word in a crowd. His favorite poem from the collection is “Eating Taco Bell with Mexicans,” whereupon introducing his future wife to his brother and promising to take her to a secret Mexican food spot, they take her to Taco Bell. The collection occasionally features his brother’s quippy text messages about becoming “MIDDLE CLASS in this mf” and how the sky and poetry are dope.

Promises of Gold went to print simultaneously with its Spanish translation by David Ruano González, a Mexican poet and translator in Mexico City. González’s translator’s note is found at the beginning of the book.

If an act of translation is always an act of betrayal, as the common saying goes, González adds that “translation is a decision too.” His commentary in the collection explains some of his decisions and how he negotiates meaning, rhythm, and wordplay between Olivarez work and his own. Gonzalez navigates between being as true as possible to Olivarez’s intentions and to the Spanish language. As he puts it, the second half of Promises of Gold is “the experiences of a Mexican from Chicago turned into the Spanish of a Mexicano who lives in Mexico.”

For Olivarez, reading his poetry in his first language makes them feel new again. “Even though I know in English what happened, seeing how the poems unfold in Spanish still surprises me and makes me emotional and makes me feel like I’m outside my poems in a way that I don’t know,” Olivarez said. “Spanish was my first language, and it’s the language that my family uses to talk to each other, so to see some of those memories, which I’ve only processed in English, borne out in the language that they sometimes happened, it made them feel a little bit raw.”

The “Mexican Heaven” poems, which feature so prominently in Citizen Illegal, are here again. In Citizen Illegal, the poems are a running thread which call back to each other and all anachronistically depict heaven and its familiar faces. There are no white people in heaven. Jesus is your reincarnated cousin from the block and God is “one of those religious Mexicans” with whom the others avoid drinking or smoking around. Sometimes, people are welcomed at the gates, and sometimes, Mexicans must sneak in or work in the kitchens to achieve their own version of the American dream.”

Citizen Illegal makes no attempt to promise the American dream. But in Promises of Gold, these Mexican heaven poems take on a darker tone. Scattered three times throughout the collection, each poem rejects heaven and all it has to offer. For its people, heaven has lost its luster.

The Mexicans say “no thank you to heaven,” because a paradise would require someone to clean it. Its inhabitants find its fancy parties boring, text each other that it is time to leave, and ditch paradise for a better spot in between heaven and hell. In the second “Mexican Heaven” poem, Olivarez writes:

“forget heaven & its promises of gold—
everything we make on this planet
has one purpose. every poem, every act
of photosynthesis, every protest. if heaven
is real, then its gates are closed to us. maybe
heaven is just a museum of all the life
we have extincted…”

Later in the poem, he adds:

“…in death, we arrive
at god’s house—only to find god torturing dolls.
we wanted to be made in god’s image—we imagined
gold & not the melting that gold requires.”

In his own words, Promises of Gold “attempts to make beautiful the complicated, but does not ignore the complicated. It embraces the world.”

José. José. José. I know we’re not primos, but I think we are primos. Just like how I know your final poem is not meant for me but I still remixed it and read it to my love during our vows.

Promises of Gold is a journey through the love and heartbreak of being alive and being Mexican (not to be confused with mexicano). I love that you can only get it in both languages because you can only get it in both languages.

Overall? José inspires me to write poems and I love his writing for that.

Thank you to Henry Holt and Co. for the advanced copy. It took me so long to review it because I had to wait until I got the hardback in my hand. I understand that's the opposite intention, but oh well. It's worth reading in hardcover.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an ARC. I thoroughly enjoyed these poems and was also able to listen to the author read some of his poems. These poems are infused with a warm and lovely energy. They are poems of all kinds or love that over all areas of life. Most are in English but some are in Spanish. A wonderful experience!

Loved this book of poetry. I recently read all of Kate Baer's work and, while they're vastly different, it put me in the mood for modern poetry. Olivarez' collection was highly enjoyable and painted the picture of a complex individual managing many facets of life, like all of us. I felt his optimism, his struggle and felt a part of his personal relationships. I've been learning Spanish over the last few years and loved that the original Spanish text was included. I plan to pick up a copy to mark up and lend out. Loved it.

I read Promises of Gold by Josè Olivarez and it was brilliant! This collection of poetry is in English and then all the poems were translated into Spanish. I listened to this as well as read it and highly recommend both formats. Josè Olivarez has once again captured the spirit of being Mexican. Moving and real, his work always hits a cord with me. I found myself tearing up many times. Reading some of the poems over and over & then going to the Spanish versions and feeling it in a different way. This collection is 🔥! I highly recommend it.

This collection was so hard to rate. As always with poetry, some of the poems were relatable and others were not. Some were funny and some were more serious. I love that the poems focused on religion, family, friends, culture, migration, and relationships. It was a perfect blend.

I loved that there poems were both in English and Spanish. However, I think it would have been better to have each poem in English and Spanish side by side rather than have all of the poems in English at the beginning and then the poems in Spanish at the end. I didn't even realize that the poems would be in Spanish until I finished reading the poems in English.

Jose Olivarez’s poems remind us to seek, share and relish in every kind of love in every kind of moment. The poems of Promises of Gold/Promesas De Oro dap the homies, pass around the beers, and wait for the truth to arrive. Eleven sections of poems explore tough-tender moments, the seconds before a burst of laughter, the wide-eyed exchanges of romantic love.

I love books where I can read and feel at the same time. Jose Olivarez's gift as a poet is to do this, and this collection is stunning. I love that you can feel a experience that may have happened at the height of the pandemic that still resonates with a reader today. There is something very true about this work. I actually look forward to reread it so that I can feel even more.

This is a spectacular poetry collection, even better than the amazing 'Citizen Illegal,' if that's even possible. I also deeply appreciated that this was fully bilingual and that the second half is all of the poems translated into Spanish (complete with a very thoughtful, thought-provoking letter from the translator at the beginning as well).

I first heard of José Olivarez on the NPR podcast Code Switch, and was so excited to see he had a collection coming out soon. I have never highlighted and hearted so many pages in a book of poetry. There is so much here about isolation, love, friendship, identity. I hope another collection is forthcoming. I will devour each and every one.

Jose Olivarez wrote Promises of God while the Covid-19 pandemic was at its height. He calls out the other pandemics that we have been living with including capitalism, colonialism, police brutality, toxic masculinity and more. What I love most about this collection is the way the translation is honored. The translator, David Ruano Gonzalez, shares his own translator's note following the author's note and shares with us the challenges he was presented with while attempting to stay true to the heart of the language used in the poems. In doing so he provides readers with a master class on Mexican Spanish and the ways we communicate across cultures and in the aftermath of migration. The ways we are changed and therefore our language changes.

The book includes both the English translation of the poems and the Spanish versions which makes this collection particularly special. Promises of Gold is split into eleven sections meant to mimic the effect of waves. I love how in the author's note Olivarez prepares the reader for what they will encounter - a way to swim across the waters of "the grief and wonder of modern life." Olivarez doesn't promise to give the reader any hopeful answers about life but he does write about the beauty of uncertainty and walking our life path despite our anxieties and fears of the unknown. Life and living well is about the relationships we have and hold and he shares his attachments so generously and lovingly. A beautiful poetry collection I know will resonate with me for a long while!

Thank you to the author and publisher for the arc copy!

I felt so seen by Promises of Gold by José Olivarez! What a wonderful, truly lovely poetry collection that touches on the experiences of being Mexican, Chicano, Latino. I loved the poems about the way men express their emotions and especially the ones about what they say only when they’re drunk. I also loved the poems that were so specific to what it means to be a Mexican and child of immigrants in this country.

It was so specific and familiar and felt like nothing I've read before. More poetry from Latines, please! (I realize there's a ton I haven't read yet that's already out there, but we need so, so much more. But yes. This collection was wonderful.)

The only thing I wish had been different is that I wish the Spanish and English version of each poem were side by side throughout the book, instead of split into two different sections so I could easily compare and contrast the versions in each language more easily sounded to me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co. for a free E-arc in exchange for my honest review.

The first half of this book is the English versions of Jose Olivarez's poems with David Ruano's Spanish translated versions of Olivarez's poems in the second half.

I loved this collection from the very start. The Author's Note and Translator's note both made me excited to get to the poems and they lived up to the expectations. This book of poetry is real, honest, funny, and heartbreaking. It explores Mexican diaspora and friendship as well as society.
It captures the multigenerational struggles, the bonds of friendship, the fears of the pandemic, the simple daily moments of love, and more.

The poems that I enjoyed the most are:
Love Poem Beginning with a Yellow Cab
In the Dream
Bull vs. Suns, 1993
Poem with a Little Less Aggression
Cal City Winter
More Please
Pedro Gets Asked About His Big Brother
Loyalty
Poem Where I Learn to Eat Escargot
Nate Calls Me Soft
United Enemies
Mexican Heaven
I Walk into the Ocean
Shelter Island
Let's Get Married

So many of them. Just read it! 5⭐s!

I’ve been highly anticipating Olivarez’s second full length collection and this did not disappoint! I know it’s just the start of the year but I’m anticipating that this book will be my favorite poetry collection of the year. This was an incredible book and I can’t wait to pick it back up and start rereading it when it’s published!

If I had to name a poetry collection that was a love letter to family, friends, community, and heritage and culture, this is definitely one of them. I loved that this was an intimate but very relatable collection. You moved through the emotions with José as you read the poems. You feel everything he has written (and sometimes more). One unique thing I loved about this poetry collection is that the poems were both in English and Spanish. You get a complete picture of each poem reading them in both languages. I wish we had more books written this way.

Although, this is the first book by José Olivarez I've read, I absolutely love it. I can't wait to read more of his work.

Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co. for an ARC of this book. This book comes out February 14, a perfect day for this amazing love letter to released into the world.