Patient Zero

“I will call the voice of this poet a ‘common’ voice… a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing.” —Philip Levine, Ploughshares This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices—of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing. From Patient Zero Love is a worried, old heartdisease, as Son House once put it, the very stuffblues are made of, real blues that consist of a male and female, not monkey junklike the “Okra blues” or “Pay Day blues,”though I think House would agreetwo hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frogbitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of whichmakes me wonder about the source of our diseaseand whose teeth first tore the heart after Adamand Eve left the garden?… Tomás Q. Morín's debut poetry collection A Larger Country was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.