“To make sense of the world, we stare / at what’s unrecognizable until it becomes familiar.” This line appears early on in Eduardo Martínez-Leyva’s Cowboy Park, setting us up for what snowballs into the lush performance of memory, masculinity, race, and the looking back all poets do, but perhaps not this expertly. Cowboy Park is a book concerned not just with memory, but with the act and effort of preserving — the table of contents is littered with portraits and still-lifes, scenes and odes. The book is transparent in its archival pursuit: one surefire way to make meaning of one’s grief and pain is to find a reason to write it down. The poem “Grief Workshop” mimics these efforts: the speaker outlines a set of guidelines, starting “with the bones.” The poem shifts into the landscape of the photograph, where the speaker instructs us to fold the corners over and over again. “Who disappears? What is left of them? / Fold again until you can no longer see a face, / a lost brother, a cancer scare, a mass shooting. / Until it is thin, mean, careworn and creased.”

Cowboy Park is not simply the speaker’s hard memories — of their mother, their brother, of growing up brown and queer in a border town, and all of the complications and pains that can come with this — but what it means for the speaker to archive them, to pursue an understanding of them. This book is of a muscular, tender, provocative voice that reads simultaneously as the man reckoning with a familial past of endurance and grief, and the child he was, experiencing those things for the first time. Sitting with this book in many ways feels like sitting across from an older relative, listening to them relay stories of their history: familiar, comfortable, yet still reverent, cautious.

In “Scenes from the Bone Orchard,” the speaker says, “Something was always determined to leave a mark.” Reading these poems is like digging your hands in the dirt: it gets under your fingernails. It becomes a part of you. Then later, in “Estrellita,” we hear, “I learned to keep going. / Despite all of this or because of it.” Martínez-Leyva doesn’t seek to romanticize the resilience marginalized people are often praised for — but does acknowledge that in the light of such experiences, there is something that motivates us forward, whether it be strength or the lack of choice to choose anything but.

Martínez-Leyva’s imagery is what lends to the content being as evocative as it is. There were so many lines that left me hushed, pausing to let them settle like a cat in my lap. From “Portrait of a Boy on the Other Side of a Glory Hole,” there is “Some call for Jesus as if that were my name.” From “Scenes from the Bone Orchard,” there is, “In Spanish, the act of coring an apple / is called ‘descorazonar,’ to dishearten.” It is too easy to say these poems leave you breathless; rather, they hold your hand and help you steady your breathing, even as it becomes impossible to imagine you could ever breathe again like you used to.