Sundress Publications announces the release of Amanda Galvan Huynh’s Where My Umbilical is Buried, a debut poetry collection about intergenerational trauma and family relationships.
Where My Umbilical is Buried is a “heart in purple” crayon under a table’s left rib. It remembers the laughter around a game of Lotería, “cicada shells / ghosting” tree branches, Texas-shaped tortillas, and learning “numbers in English, / in Spanish.” Here, we find familial portraits scattered across small Texas towns, boots shuffling to La Reina de Cumbia in dance halls, hands “[grasping] at words” to make sense of an unforgiving world.
Galvan Huynh asks us to consider the intersections of our heritage and to reflect on our mothering as it nests within our present selves. She calls us to witness the ramifications of assimilation and the inheritance of fear—how a tongue resists being “pulled away / saying grandpa instead of abuelo” and cultivates space to “envelop the Bidi Bidi Bom Bom [her] familia / sways to.” Where My Umbilical is Buried is a threshold for acceptance and healing. Galvan Huynh discovers what it means to be a daughter of a grieving mother, orphaned at sixteen, and the ways trauma passes down to the next generation. These poems meditate on what happens when a daughter has “no room left to hold / her mother’s pain.” We learn “to be worthy.” We learn “to dig / into the soil / and hold on.”
José Angel Araguz, author of Rotura, says, “From the title, Where My Umbilical is Buried, Amanda Galvan Huynh invites readers to engage with the metaphor and image-rich sensibility that drive the poems within. From the roads, nights, and fields where memory lies “buried” under the sounds of voices whispering, Coke tab bracelets jangling, and cumbias, these poems grow and flourish into a lyric gift, an expression of affirmation and presence for gente y familia—the living, the dead, as well as who we must be in between.”
Order your copy of Where My Umbilical is Buried on the Sundress website: https://sundress-publications.square.site/
Amanda Galvan Huynh (she/her) is a Chicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of a chapbook, Songs of Brujería, and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics. Galvan Huynh is currently a doctoral student in English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
