Benjamin Garcia is a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow, was the 2017 Latinx Scholar at the Frost Place, and was a 2018 CantoMundo Fellow at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2018, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. In Thrown in the Throat (Milkweed Editions), his debut book of poetry, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. In the process retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival.