Join Deep Vellum for a virtual multimedia celebration of Mike Soto’s debut poetry collection, A Grave is Given Supper. This event will take place on Facebook Live at facebook.com/deepvellum.

Mike Soto will be performing with musician Zach Galindo, followed by a conversation with Janet M. Hendrickson.

A Narco-Acid Western told in a series of interlinked poems, Soto’s striking debut collection follows the converging paths of two protagonists through El Sumidero, a fictional US/Mexico border town where an ongoing drug war is raging. The surreal verse of Soto’s poems portrays a bleak political climate as it coincides with the rituals of love & loss, culture & spirituality, & the quest for a better life at all costs. Following the narrative arc of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s classic cult film, El Topo, A Grave is Given Supper builds a world saturated with a mystical aura that describes the finite tensions & complicated desires of lives taking place in the borderland. Purchase A Grave is Given Supper here.

Mike Soto is a first generation Mexican American, raised in East Dallas and in a small town in Michoacán. He is the author of the chapbooks Beyond the Shadow’s Ink, and most recently Dallas Spleen (Deep Vellum). He received his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, & was awarded the James Merrill Poetry Fellowship by Vermont Studio Center in 2019. A Grave Is Given Supper is his debut collection of poetry.

Janet Hendrickson’s experimental translation of a 1611 dictionary, Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language by Sebastián de Covarrubias (New Directions), was longlisted for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She is also the translator of The Future Is Not Ours (ed. Diego Trelles Paz, Open Letter), an anthology of recent Latin American fiction. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell. Currently she is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Spanish at the University of Dallas.