Eat the Mouth that Feeds You

In gritty, sometimes fantastical stories about Latinx life, women challenge feminine stereotypes and make sense of fractured family histories. In visceral, embodied prose, Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them.

A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future.

A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh.

A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family’s beloved lime tree.

Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women's wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

'Fragoza's debut collection delivers expertly crafted tales of Latinx people trying to make sense of violent, dark realities. Magical realism and gothic horror make for effective stylistic entryways, as Fragoza seamlessly blurs the lines between the corporeal and the abstract.' — Publishers Weekly

'I felt this collection deep in my bones. Like the Chicanx women whose voices she centers, Carribean Fragoza's writing doesn’t flinch. It is sharp and dream-like, tender-hearted and brutal, carved from the violence and resilience of generations past and present.' — Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home

'Simply put, this electrifying book may cement Fragoza's legacy in the canon of Chicanx/Latinx literature as the visceral stories dance off the pages.' — Marian Perales, Latino Book Review

ISBN: 9780872868335 | Published: 8 June 2021 | Paperback | 144 pages