Paul Hlava Ceballos’ work has been published in Poetry magazine, Pleiades, TriQuarterly, Poetry Northwest, Bomb Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, among other journals and newspapers, and has been translated to Ukrainian and nominated for the Pushcart. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker, Christina Sharpe, and Torkwase Dyson. His debut collection banana [ ] (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 2021 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. The poems in banana [ ] examine the extractive relationship the United States has with the Americas and its people through poetic portraits of migrants, family, and personal memories. At the heart of the book is a long poem that traces the history of bananas in Latin America using only found text from sources such as history books, declassified CIA documents, and commercials. The book includes collage, Ecuadorian “décimas,” a sonnet series in the voices of Incan royalty at the moment of colonization, and a long poem interspersed with photos and the author’s mother’s bilingual idioms. The collection traverses language and borders, history and story, traditional and invented forms, and guides us beyond survival to love.
