With Tripas Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a
multicultural multigenerational childhood home in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother
who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola and his Chinese American father and
grandparents who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics a dialogic
poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory Som
participates in a practice of mem(oir) placing each poem's ear toward a confluence of history
labor and languages while also enacting a kind of "telephone" between cultures. Invested in
the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor Som's lyricism weaves together the
narratives of his transnational communities bringing to light what is overshadowed in the
reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise-one attuned to the echo
in the hecho the oracle in the órale. .
