This Someone I Call Stranger

Book excerpt: This Someone I Call Stranger, by James Diaz, is absolutely transcendent. Diaz's evocative and courageous writing conjures up cinematic imagery with heartbreaking vulnerability and unpretentious strength. Reading his poetry, I could feel myself leaning in, yearning alongside him for such things as the affirmation of love, beauty, and release in the face of brokenness, loss, and pain. Diaz's poems will make you feel deeply. His poems will make you want to write, even if you're not a writer. His poems will make you look at your world through a new lens, see and feel things through a bigger, perhaps broken, yet wide-open heart. Kym Tuvim In our era of irony, disposability, and impatience, the poems of This Someone I Call Stranger, James Diaz's debut collection, reverberate with rare authenticity and lyrical pain. Threading through a past of blind forests and dark basements, empty cupboards, dirty needles, hospital floors, and bad men who won't die, this book is a necessary example of duende for the twenty-first century. These poems will arrest you. They have hungry souls, and they ache without breaking. They will hang in your brain and settle in your bones, and they will also move you forward, bravely, toward uncertain light. Jessie Janeshek Authentic, unafraid, and unassuming, James Diaz's This Someone I Call Stranger is a personal yet dynamic landscape of the darker parts of the soul, which somehow remains "impossibly alive" no matter how far from home one has strayed. The poems are equal parts vulnerable and strong, a breathing example of how those qualities are inextricable, how there is something about the darkness that cannot put out the light, how there is something about the light that gains its brightness from the shadows. Diaz writes as if no one outside is listening, which is to say, as if these poems are not poems at all but whispered murmurs from one aspect of the self to another, and we the readers just happen to be lucky enough to catch these glimpses of humanity in its most raw essence: determined yet mysterious, messy yet transcendent. Sarah Certa