My first read of 2024! I’m very excited to start my year with this book because I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t begin reading Conchitina Cruz’s works until I owned all of them. I had to read her debut before I could move forward to the next, which I got a copy of only in the last month of the previous year. I couldn’t allow my reading momentum to be interrupted.

I know the most popular poem from this astounding debut poetry collection is “Alunsina takes a walk in the rain.” I would beg to differ, and I cannot stress this enough: Conchitina Cruz, whose “Dear City,” was introduced to me through a Humanities class back in college, is insane for beginning this book with a poem that bears the line, “What comes from heaven is always a blessing,” then ending it with a poem about ash that’s likened to/mistaken as rain and snow, both of which come from the sky.

She sort of teases her readers too by titling one of her poems “What is it about tenderness,” since this book, from start to finish, is incredibly tender in tone and theme. As corny as it may sound, she uses the city as a geographical site to map her desire. She takes us through the grittiness of roads and alleyways, where there exist houses and buildings that serve as sites of many histories and memories, each of which refers to the collective and individual senses. There seems to be no escape for the persona in this collection because everywhere she goes and everything she sees in the city reminds her of something that impacted her emotionally in the past. In the wake of this self-awareness, she creates musings to relieve her of the emotions that fully overcome her, at the expense of bringing about wistfulness on the people, the readers, who are able to make sense of her thoughts.