A poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay
inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban
immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling
with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities.
Richard Blanco's childhood and adolescence were experienced between two
imaginary worlds: his parents' nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba and his imagined
America, the country he saw on reruns of The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver
—an "exotic" life he yearned for as much as he yearned to see "la patria."
Navigating these worlds eventually led Blanco to question his cultural identity
through words;