Unaccompanied

Author: Javier Zamora 

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (2017)

Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.

Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun."

"Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans."

–Jamaal May

“Zamora insists that the stories he houses in his blood deserve to be told, and in the telling he has created a truly astonishing debut.”

–Rodney Gomez