The Day's Hard Edge

“Poems from The Day’s Hard Edge perfect the dance between lyric and storytelling, between autobiography and ars poetica . . . this collection promises to reflect [Rodríguez] at new heights in his work.” —LitHub

“Gorgeously commanding.” —Bay Area Reporter

“I’ve long admired José Antonio Rodríguez's writing, ever since Tia Chucha Press published his brilliant The Shallow End of Sleep. In this collection the intimate and hard truths of the borderlands surge with the singular revelatory rages of a queer brown man amidst the laments of a thousand forgotten souls. There is also love in the exquisite details, the surprising twists of language, the searing haunted lines.” —Luis J. Rodríguez, founding editor of Tia Chucha Press and former Los Angeles Poet Laureate

"There’s great darkness and pain within these pages, but also wonder and comfort." – Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

"José Antonio Rodríguez has done it once again—given us a poetry collection that sings through pain and arrives at wisdom. The Day's Hard Edge takes us along borders, not only the Texas/Mexico borderlands of the poet’s childhood, but to the borders between the living and the dead, between trauma and healing, and between magic and poetry. In poem after poem, you’ll feel the urgency of witness and Rodríguez’s expansion of verse, “one that transports you / To a corner of the soul you didn’t know was there.”  —Denise Duhamel, author of Second Stories: Poems