The light must spill to shine.
The thing you must be is yourself.
Intimate and uncompromising, Rev. Julián Jamaica
Soto’s debut collection, Spilling the Light, is a luminous offering to
their communities and a defiant declaration of their worth in a world hostile
to their queer, disabled, and brown being.
“America, is this freedom?” they ask. “I cannot
prove to you that / I am a person,” writing boldly of identity, community,
liberation, and erasure through a prism of tender moments and powerful
reckonings. These are poems of broken hallelujahs and codes/witching, of hunger
and fire, of hope and resilience. They are complex, tender, and empowering.
They embolden us to become our truest selves, willing us to survive.