Hope You Blend In

Publication Date: July 15, 2024
Paperback, 100 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-69-1
Don’t let the subtitle fool you, or the section and poem titles alluding to still life, landscape, photography, studies in color, all suggesting that this book somehow is about art, providing the metaphor in the title, of “blending in” in the sense of colors combining to make something new and whole out of initial difference. But this is America, where for all of the melting pot myth we know that colors do not blend easily, and perhaps now even less so gender identity; and in her powerful debut collection Samantha Tetangco writes from the perspective of a “queer person of color” where the hope of her title is hope of survival, “for the promise / of home” despite knowing that like an invasive plant species, “certain visitors are not welcome here.” She surveys a landscape of violence, the reality of “bullets, bullets” everywhere, employing another metaphor, our national symbol of an eagle that “was not real, but they killed it nonetheless” to express her anguish: “I pulled its dead body onto my lap. Tell me: / what should I do with it now? / It is heavy. My arms are tired. / If I put it down, who will pick it up?” The real hope here is found in that question, in caring enough to remain committed to the promise of wholeness. Her closing line is the exhortation “Repeat the words: Don’t forget, don’t forget.” Don’t forget, that is, to live, which in the end is the art that this book truly is about.

Praise for Samantha Tetangco &
Hope You Blend In: Studies in Color & Light

In this fierce debut, poet Samantha Tetangco wields “words like flint” to reveal the world we live in, from the apocalyptic world of California wildfires where “our backyards became / this hell / we have created” to the real world in which the queer brown body becomes “an open wound.” But these poems also remind us of the ordinary magic left to us: breathing in a lover’s scent, planting tulips, and even the beauty of weeds blossoming “so small & sweet / they always go unnamed.” Meticulously crafted and political in the best ways, this book brims with sharp beauty and reminds us what it is to be human.
--Lisa D. Chavez, author of In an Angry Season

Samantha Tetangco’s gaze is so sharp in this collection of poems, that a single shift in tense can pierce a hole in the wall of contemporary rhetoric. We who “taught the matches / how to strike” are given an aperture to view our own participation in history. Beyond holding witness, these poems provoke action. Are we—sharing a home, a country, a planet (on fire!)—actually in this together or are we just pretending? You will be known by what you choose: will you be a bearer or a borer of fruit?
--Benjamin Garcia, author of Thrown in the Throat