The University of Arizona Press
The Right to Remain Violets
The Right to Remain Violets is an electrifying poetry collection that reimagines the language of policing, public education, and state surveillance to illuminate the lived realities of Black and Brown youth in East Palo Alto—a city shaped by redlining, freeway expansion, and decades of over-policing. Blending documentary poetics with hip-hop cadence and Catholic liturgy, Antonio De Jesús López transforms transcripts, municipal documents, and legal language into a powerful form of witness. These poems trace how children are drafted into systems of surveillance and criminalization, even as they search for joy and solidarity amid Silicon Valley’s contrasts of wealth and dispossession.
Inventive and emotionally resonant, the collection spans sonnets, sestinas, hip-hop, and prayer, insisting that language can both indict and heal. López brings his experiences as an award-winning poet, scholar, and former mayor of East Palo Alto to each poem. At once elegy and refusal, The Right to Remain Violets speaks to readers of documentary poetics, social justice literature, and those who believe in the radical importance of protecting childhood in an America reckoning with itself.
“Antonio López’s The Right to Remain Violets is a work of such thematic profundity and political incisiveness it leaves me in awe. From its timely cutting social commentary to its timeless formal inventiveness, López shows how poetry can serve as a vital means of critique and engagement while also transforming language and understanding itself in the process. Dope, deep, and dazzling, this is a collection you will not soon forget.”—John Keene, author of Punks: New & Selected Poems
“Audacious and ambitious in form and function and musicality and muscle, The Right to Remain Violets is a must-read. I can't describe it to you—it’s so good I had my face screwed up the entire time I read it.”—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold
“‘To gangbang’s a sonnet’ announces The Right to Remain Violets, a formally dazzling and rigorously inventive new poetry collection by Antonio De Jesús López. Sampling from hip-hop, sestinas, alabanzas, gang codes, and real-world math problems, the forms are stubbornly alive, the homies are funny, the fathers are trying, the girls on the back of the bus are singing something more Greek than R&B, and the speaker wants to make it past Tuesday for the sight of his little brother ‘going in on a funnel cake all Tony Montana.’ Moving between East Palo Alto and the ancient world, grief and witnessing aren’t clean or redemptive here, yet the collection insists on the fragile, defiant belief that to testify is still to fight against erasure.”—Aileen Cassinetto, San Mateo County poet laureate emerita
“Antonio De Jesús López takes code-switching to the next level in The Right to Remain Violets. These poems are a love poem to East Palo Alto, California—true love, accepting its beauty and its blight—that speaks to our country in our current time of uncertainty. With lyric poems and actual data from city records, López manages to bring the concerns of American cities into high definition. Not only does he have insight as the former mayor of the city, but he also has receipts, rendered in lyric verse so nimble his lines feel like he had a DJ standing behind as they were written. The camera angle never sits still, but he always knows where to point its lens. Listen up and look closely.”—A. Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again
“With visual poems, sonnets, math problems, invented documents, and invented forms and shapes, there is a progressive overwhelm to Antonio De Jesús López’s ambitious sophomore collection that threatens to pull the reader under the tide of its craft, vision, adoration, and mourning. Let it. This poet/politician sings such urgent, beautiful, and complex songs for his city and his people that to drown in this work means to come out on the other side on a new shore, transformed by the depths of love and genius experienced inside here.”—Danez Smith, author of Bluff: Poems
“The Right to Remain Violets moves with a velocity like no other poetry collection. Covering state violence, boyhood, the afterlives of segregation in East Palo Alto, Antonio López remakes the documentary poem that vaults off the page; it’s sonic, virtuosic—even the typography breakdances in thrilling wild forms. Throughout, López explores, with devastating tenderness, what institutions erase. He is truly a visionary.”—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“This collection is a voracious love song dedicated to East Palo Alto and its residents. Between the shadows of Stanford University and the Silicon Valley, these poems document how three young boys of color—through arrest, court proceedings, and charges—are violently made men. As testimony, López writes: ‘I am on the border of going crazy all the ways this country hates me,’ and as testament, he indicts the machinations and legacies of colonialism and a nation complicit in its crimes against freedom. This book offers, as protest chant, as corrido, as war cry, a path toward one’s own redemption and liberation.”—Ángel Garcia, author of Teeth Never Sleep: Poems
“This is a collection of poetry that bares, by means of lived experience and documentation, the layered failures of an education system that too often forgets its most vulnerable students. López writes with linguistic prowess about a community shadowed by gang violence and institutional neglect, yet despite the challenges he faces, he finds the resolve to write his way out and into an unapologetic poetics of the streets that sets the page on fire.”—Octavio Quintanilla, author of Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours
