In her debut chapbook, A Casual Apocalypse in Acapulco, Esquivel maps the apocalypse as a recurring condition and asks what survives each time the world ends again, uncovering concealed stories while celebrating beadwork and lotería, grandmothers' gardens and loves made inevitable by history. We are everything we have ever been-and, lucky for us, there is still room to dream.
"Angelica Esquivel navigates the end of the world armed with a mermaid-shaped pocketknife, perfume, obsidian mirrors, and language that transmutes trespass and undoes space and time. These poems break history in multiple tongues that lick inherited wounds while savoring the salty sweet of bodies that stagger 'drunk on desire and words' into a future that remembers and a future that forgets in unequal measure. This is a divinatory lyric, a work of magic and power that burns in order to plant new seeds."
-Stephanie Heit, author of Psych Murders
"Sometimes dreamlike, but always sharply precise, A Casual Apocalypse in Acapulco balances a quiet devastation with rich cultural imagery-corn husks, lotería cards, jelly sandals. In the poem 'we are everything we have ever been,' she writes: 'what i wanted / was perfect / memory / but our blood / is a broken / historical record'-Esquivel sends us back in time, to glimpses of childhood memories, yes, and even further to precolonial México, expertly stitching together a vividly colored quilt of recollection. These striking poems grapple with visions of a before and an after-and Esquivel's words carry us through the landscape of the aftermath."
-Nadia Mota, author of La Chiflada
"A Casual Apocalypse in Acapulco journeys a kaleidoscope of various dreads: the dread of ancestry and trauma, the dread of post-colonialism and patriarchal downpour (to name a few),
engulfing us with a lyrically lush and emotional experience. But despite the looming inevitability, in poems like 'Lengua,' Esquivel reminds us we 'must learn to honor without needing to lay claim, must learn to find solace in the shape of Turtle Island.'"
-Erik Manuel Soto, Vallejo, CA Poet Laureate & author of Inside the Umber Iris, winner of the Gronk Nicandro prize for poetry
