Black Lavender Milk

“What I hope no reader misses is that this is a book not just about grief, memory, and home, but about Latino grief, Latino memory, and home as a child of immigrants. As Latinos, and especially as Latino Americans, our grief systems work differently, we die differently, our memories are translations, our bodies project into two or more languages. But just as he invites you seductively and sleepily into the book’s process and materials, he invites you to take it and put it into your own body. Black Lavender Milk asks you to lie with it under your pillow, to carry it with you and not read it, to “stay as long as you’d like.'”

“In what may seem like a discordant and fractured narrative on the surface, is actually an organic and masterfully articulated prism of concepts that coalesce into a rich handbook for modernity in California—which is, to him, a narrative of exhaustion and recuperation. Instead of looking for an exit from the Platonic cave, he shines a light on the crystallites inside, illuminating the universal geometry of one’s memory and identity. This is the identity and the body memory of a migrant, transient and transplant. The modern individual no longer holds identity to a place, but a memory of a place, of a heritage. To Angel, when the individual travels—his modus operandi being flight—they lose their sense of habit and involuntary, unconscious action invokes the recovery genealogical memory.”

“Angel Dominguez, in Black Lavender Milk (published in December, 2015) dives downward, into ancestry—specifically, the Mayan cenote as a gateway to the underworld. The book “offers the space of a ‘novel,’” according to the publisher description, “as a site of mourning, inquiry, and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on Writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry, and Dreaming.”