Kaya Press, 2024
 
I ask about what falls away is an extended elegy set in the alleyways and Pacific-bound boulevards of San Diego, California during the current global health crisis. Called “an antidote to despair” (Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, The Swarm) and poetry that “complicates notions of solidarity, community, and justice, distilling the quotidian into something sacred" (Rachelle Cruz, God's Will For Monsters), Jason Magabo Perez's second full-length book of poetry serves as an intimate grief manifesto against the daily violations of racial capitalism. Perez, 2023-2024 San Diego Poet Laureate, employs a critical and improvisatory assemblage of lyric and litany, narrative and distillation, fragment and refrain to map city, solidarity, and history. At once playful and tenacious, I ask about what falls away pays careful witness to working-class uncles, aunties, cousins and youth in rhythm with the anti-colonial wisdom of writers such as Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Aimé Césaire, remixing sorrow with a deep love and knowledge for everyday people.