Angelica Maria Barraza Tran's debut collection, How to Know You're Dreaming When You're Dreaming, Lesson One, articulates a practice of queer-of-color worldmaking in which the lyric strives to bridge the gaps and silences that separate past and present. In a language that is both speculative and grounded in the material, these poems re-enchant the everyday, revealing the sacred within the rituals of domestic life. They devote themselves, like candles on an altar, to life in all its manifestations: to the ancestors, to lives too soon lost, to the disappeared, and to all those who are to come. In the tradition of Ana Mendieta, these poems construct a rigorous textual body, a body responsive to environment, to violence and erasure, and to collective, intergenerational desires and longings. With this collection, Barraza Tran claims her place within a rich lineage of experimental poetics and Latinx feminism.
