Querida
Querida
“A Vibrant Debut” - Lit Hub
Winner, 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2025 California Book Award in Poetry
Finalist, 2025 Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award
Praise for Querida
Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone
Memory is a guiding force in Nathan Osorio’s stunning debut, Querida. From the opening, single-sentence tour-de-force of a poem to sonnet-sequences throughout, Osorio’s formal agility and singular voice takes hold of our attention and never lets it go.
Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
In his first book, Nathan Xavier Osorio doesn’t think about immigration, family, and capitalism—he thinks through these subjects, imbuing them with a lyrical intelligence that refutes idealization and answers and isolation. Querida is a spectacular book that demands and rewards multiple readings.
Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion
Nathan Xavier Osorio’s Querida leads the reader through a series of hymns, songs, and prayers that give voice to the question of how we are formed by what we are born into. The mark of inheritance is presented, repeated, worked through, and returned to—as it is slowly absorbed into the body of the text. Inheritance is the very matter from which this exquisite debut collection derives.
Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Oh You Robot Saints!
Osorio’s sonnets sing from the control of his abundance, as he threads the sonnet crown “The Last Town Before the Mojave,” through the book, a stamp of skill and presence that leads readers toward the closing series of “Ritual” poems, themselves interrupted by the weaving of another even tighter sequence, “Abandonarium.” Throughout, Osorio delves into the borders between human and nature, between form and its curated and organic disruptions.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Poem by poem, the collection showcases Osorio’s talents, the life he’s grown into and the culture he breathes with every breath. This collection presents a version of the known world that feels new — and it is beautiful.
Cream City Review
Querida’s American landscape is one of contrasts: “Hot Cheeto bags” juxtapose with “hand-stitched servilletas,” there are “pigeons / or palomas,” and “the barrio’s first and last organic grocery store.” Osorio mends gaps from disconnectedness with family relations, transnational markers, heritage, memories, and faith.
Santa Barbara Independent
One of the glories of Querida is Osorio’s ability to “listen closely to the ruins / of civilizations razed to folklore, / how to become the waterless rivers / and cindery hills and erupt in bloom.”
Querida is a place-based lyrical meditation on the lives of my immigrant parents, their collective memory, language, and brother/mother/fatherhood in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional reflections, imagistic portraits of people and places, and decolonial poetic rituals—braided with a crown of sonnets—a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism.
Querida was published by University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the Pitt Poetry Series on September 10, 2024.