Irma, Maria, Fiona, and Me by Edcel Javier Cintrón-Gonzalez

In his first poetry collection, Irma, Maria, Fiona, and Me, Edcel J. Cintrón-Gonzalez uses a conversationally poetic tone to convey the deeply traumatic and un-sanitized collective experience of hurricanes for the Puerto Rican diaspora. This collection resists the sanctity of the “resiliency narrative,” which overlooks the layered devastation, the collective and generational trauma, and the compounding catastrophe. Instead the reader is brought face-to-face with the practicalities of living at the whim of a hurricane and questioning—and continually revising—the meaning of survival when it’s used over, over, and again.