The University of Arizona Press
February 21, 2024
What do Raffi and Pharrell Williams have in common? They’re both on Poet Diego Báez’s Spotify playlist for his collection Yaguareté White!
Báez introduces his musical influences:
Growing up in Bnorm, IL, two genres dominated our household boombox: Christian rock and Paraguayan folk. Also, Kenny G. (Mom was a fan.) The arpa and accordion of polka paraguaya spun almost exclusively on bootleg CDs burned and returned undeclared on flights back from Asunción. Occasionally, cassettes.
Yaguareté White came together, slowly, over the course of 15 years. But the book’s narratives, images, and fables stretch back to my earliest memories: Curled up on the floor of a jet over the Amazon, en route to São Paulo or Buenos Aires, before that fourth and final airborne leg to my father’s home country.
Go to the Largehearted Boy Book Notes series to read more; listen to the music here.
About the book:
In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar.
The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.
