“Like the many Aureliano Buendías in Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the many Alfonsos in To Pay for Our Next Breath represent a genealogy where time becomes elastic, and one must wait to be named: ‘My family has never called me / Alfonso. It’s reserved for the elders.’ Zapata’s attention to family and memory are connected to music, and his muscular lyrics reflect a language that is rough and lush, direct and course, bombastic and tender, as speakers move from what Louise Gluck would describe, ‘How heavy my mind is, filled with the past.’ The concern with the past is an ongoing flux where the poet’s attention turns to the landscape and the fragility of life in places where there is a constant threat to ecological destructions. But it’s Zapata’s language that transports us, ‘make language intravenous,’ he writes, as if anything other than language is payment enough to guarantee our next breath.
—Richard Boada, author of We Find Each Other in the Darkness
“Alfonso Zapata’s debut performance, To Pay for Our Next Breath, enters the world singing in every key while simultaneously dancing across and down the page. Both Prince and Michael Jackson would be proud. This meticulously curated mixtape of poems moves with visual and aural precision accompanied by Selena, D’Angelo, Club Nouveau and the Foo Fighters, while Bill Withers, Linda Ronstadt, Aaron Neville and K-Ci & JoJo sing back up. The satisfying sequential poems like, ‘The Writer Attempts to Paint’ and ‘Leaving My Abuelos’ Basement’ are as brilliantly executed as the formal dexterity Zapata exhibits through three expertly crafted sections of prose, erasure, ghazals and more. Every exit and final line in this collection lands with such precision, Zapata can no longer hide behind the ‘who invited him’ to the party. This poet is our new Prom King!”
—Frank X Walker, author of Load In Nine Times
“In Alfonso Zapata’s superb debut collection, To Pay for Our Next Breath, we are taken masterfully into the complicated world of family, through honest and detailed exploration of memory and Zapata’s keen attention to detail. He seamlessly integrates the Spanish language into the lines of his poems, each carefully crafted and finely-honed. Zapata's narratives are wide-ranging in poetic form and in subject, giving us a wonderfully unique and intimate look into the life of one Mexican American Midwest family (his own). The voice here is unfailingly likable, often tremendously funny, and always, always, heartbreakingly honest.”
—Julia Johnson, author of Subsidence
“The band’s all here. Some dressed in dance sweat, others performing in the mists of the rafters. In this must-read collection, To Pay for Our Next Breath, Zapata details to how to build a life in the shadows of totems. He invites us to join the chorus of family and love.”
—DaMaris B. Hill, author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing