“Penned with intense and captivating energy, Gerard Robledo’s My Mother the Butcher is deeply pleasurable to read, even as it evokes painful family dynamics. In these poems, mundane moments are rendered in a way that reveals the intensity of feeling and dire stakes beneath them. I feel in this book the aches and pressures of parenthood, the living ongoingness of childhood wounds, and the gift and burden of poetry as a way to make a song of so much grief. Here the self is a threshold across which inheritances barrel concurrently, in and out, forward and back. A gorgeous collection—visceral, musical, propulsive, and vivid in ways that wow me again and again.” - Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
“Gerard Robeldo’s vulnerability and self-awareness are striking and brutal—’You ruined my life/and all that made happiness/cleaved never to sing/verses of love your child needs.’ My Mother, the Butcher is a decisive portrayal of a family, and Robledo is a skilled observer, ‘sling my pickled mother off the floor & over/my shoulder, dangling like my first kill, first blood./The first voice I felt caress my ear & lull me,/now callous, melting on my neck.’ In the face of trauma and nostalgia, Robledo finds redemption in the mundane forging a hopeful path forward.” - Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion
“Filled with tenderness and lyrical beauty, My Mother, The Butcher, paints a searing portrait of childhood abuse and its aftermath, interrogating the way trauma is inherited, internalized, and extended across generations. In poems that are carved out of lived experience, Robledo constructs a complex masculinity, examining fatherhood, Mexican-American heritage, and the damage incurred in pursuit of the American dream. A deeply felt, ruthlessly honest quest for healing and forgiveness.” - Kai Carlson-Wee, author of Rail
“My Mother, the Butcher invites you in for a home-cooked meal, just don’t expect your typical choice cut meat, though there’s plenty of beef. There’s tofu, veggies, and ‘fake meat’ prepared by a poet who, as a single dad, must ‘be everything: a good father & mother’ to his daughter against the forces of his own dysfunctional family. Machismo, nourishing mothers, identity politics are on the cutting board and nothing is spared evisceration. Robledo’s debut collection cuts through the fat, muscle, gristle and marrow ‘in search of an ease / to parenthood.’” - John Olivares Espinoza, author of The Date Fruit Elegies
“Gerard Robledo’s debut collection, My Mother, the Butcher, begins with a ‘Murder Ballad’ and the story of ‘how much it costs to love a child.’ The cost of love in these poems, however, is not a nurturing one: it’s a reckoning, ‘my mother’s bloody apron, the butcher. She wears sections of my body & childhood, outlines choice cuts . . . ‘ an understanding of how speakers caught in cycles of traumas try not to repeat the violence of the past, but rather embrace a tenderness against the butchering.” - Richard Boada, author of We Find Each Other in the Darkness
