The Wait is the title of his first book, a revision of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which takes place in a rural town plagued by cartel violence and forced disappearances, and follows two mothers as they search for their missing children. This theme—an unresolved, interminable wait—reappears as a throughline in his poignant new novel Pages of Mourning, immobilizing the lives of its central characters.

Brandon Shimoda is a mystic poet. Hydra Medusa is an otherworldly book. By that I mean it is wholly of this world. The poems are small rituals that unmake and remake our world into something it actually resembles. This resemblance is not what you see; the feeling snakes into your entrails and refuses to leave. If you pick up one of his poems and turn it around in your hands, it will visit your dreams.