About the Author

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Guillermo Filice Castro’s previous chapbooks include Mixtape for a War (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018) and Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). He’s the recipient of a Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship. His poems appear in Allium, Barrow Street, Brooklyn Rail, Fugue, Mudroom, Pine Hills Review, Second Coming, and many other journals, as well as in Best American Poetry 2023, edited by Elaine Equi. Born and raised in Argentina, Castro lives in New Jersey with his husband.

Reviews

Guillermo Filice Castro names his tongue “my sailor” in a poem in I Am Not Alone, and this collection could be described as “a script of tongues”—restless, migrating, scavenging meaning from wherever it lands. Nothing stays still except the poetic voice, buoyant and responsive as a buoy. The poems’ impulse is to document both brutal and intimate realities: ICE, a visit to an aged father, dreams, gay initiation, forks and spoons, work, and light spooling. A retrospective of the poet's generative growth, this chapbook’s also a love letter to life—its “sweet pulp” and “broken skin.” Always kinetic, its surrealist leaps and surprises coalesce into a collage of beauty and violence. Among the chapbook’s central themes is migration, enacted through alliteration and consonance in a sonic feast of multiplicity and drift: things perpetually slipping from their source, including language itself — “music made/visible/with the sound/off.” This book will daze you into stillness and eternity. Profoundly observant, even the daily props of life — the background of things —speak.

 —Shira Dentz, author of the sun a blazing zero and Sisyphusina

The tongue, the heart, and the skin are the organs that most inhabit these poems by Guillermo Filice Castro. And, as a poet who does not limit himself to the corporeal, he boldly reveals his thirsts and fears through reminiscence, a wild revery, imaginative leaps, and a humor that is variously pointed and generous, or (to steal one of his phrases) humor that can both harness & release. This is an inventive and timely collection that reminds us of how difficult it is for humans to convince themselves of one thing without also being aware of its opposite: a beloved’s presence/their absence, matutinal hope/grounded night terrors, and, as referenced in the book’s title: I Am Not Alone/I am alone. As Filice Castro says of a photo’s blurry subject in his soaring ode to an old friend, Dear José Luis: “So who cares if it’s you or not, querido. Let’s just say it is.”

 —Ron Drummond, author of Why I Kick At Night and former editor of Barrow Street

The emotionally intelligent and well-crafted poems composed in I Am Not Alone give Guillermo Filice Castro readers much to delight in and ponder. The delight is his ongoing investigation into English, his second language, while returning to Spanish, his first, in lines that soothe the heart or recall suffering. The title of each poem starts with the phrase I Am Not Alone and the first is a one sentence masterwork, where the poet notes: “& I start walking back home/as a whole country takes a spill,”-- a country to which he immigrated a few decades before. And these poems navigate his Argentinian past with his American present—the loss of his dear mother, his first lovers, and how as an aware and compassionate being he finds ways to remain a generous human in a corrupt and dangerous world. Chapbooks may be only a few pages. but that does not lessen the power of ideas, craft and poetic ambition found in this volume. It is welcome addition to Filice Castro’s oeuvre and you will not be alone enjoying this new work.

 —Patricia Spears Jones, author of The Beloved Community and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems