Carribean Fragoza’s debut
collection of stories reside in the domestic surreal, featuring an
unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the
U.S./Mexico border, and universes beyond.
Carribean
Fragoza’s imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic
tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions
designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college,
only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown
town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of
being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for
ingesting grandma’s letters has extended to taking bites of her
actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their
distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the
backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family’s beloved lime
tree.
Victories
are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women’s
wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues
to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
“Eat
the Mouth That Feeds You
is an accomplished debut with language that has the potential to
affect the reader on a visceral level, a rare and significant
achievement from a forceful new voice in American literature.”–Kali
Fajardo-Anstine, New York Times Book Review, and author of Sabrina
and Corina
“Eat
the Mouth that Feeds You
renders the feminine grotesque at its finest.”–Myriam Gurba,
author of Mean
“Eat
the Mouth that Feeds You
will establish Fragoza as an essential and important new voice in
American fiction.”–Héctor Tobar, author of The Barbarian
Nurseries
