Burns, SG Huerta

In poems that capture the complexity of life as a transitioning Xicanx in a tumultuous Texas climate, SG Huerta’s Burns balances the intrinsically human need for connection with the struggle to love oneself. Vivid images of half-empty bottles of testosterone gel and charred vegan grilled cheese form the backdrop for explorations of identity, orientation, grief, and an absent father across the full landscape of what it means to live. Embedded in a complicated family and pressures of assimilation, Huerta straddles liminal spaces with these poems: “I want to write / a queer poem without his ghost / reading it over my shoulder.” Through sonnets, stream-of-consciousness, and lyrical narratives, Burns balances internal conflict and societal expectation. Anyone who has overshared with a cashier out of longing for a flash of acknowledgment across another’s face will know the unresolved grief, love, and limitless self-discovery smoldering throughout Burns.

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SG Huerta’s Burns is so Texas like “oil to pay for college wind power,” so Xicanx like “if we make / ourselves laugh we’ll remember / we don’t need them to,” so trans like ”It is hard to revise when I can’t promise myself / tomorrow.”  This book is all of the things I love in one: honest about the mess of living, dexterous like any book of poems should be. I read & reread to be reminded of what matters: these words, this earth, our recollection of it. In its explorations of empire, the sonnet, death of a father, transition, abuse, young adulthood, identity, and the Lone Star State, we see a life well lived and dissected in lines, an ode to the fact that, as Huerta says, ”I didn’t decide to be a poet. I have a condition.” I love this book. I think you will, too.

–KB Brookins, award-winning author of Pretty

Burns might be the most tender manifesto I’ve ever encountered. Smoldering at the intersection of trans, queer, and Xicanx poetics, the poems in SG Huerta’s first full-length collection announce the arrival of an important new voice in American poetry. Reckoning with mourning, mental illness, and queer identity with searching honesty, these poems confront—and exquisitely dismantle—personal and cultural inheritances. Huerta’s eye for the extraordinarily ordinary means that when their poems delve into personal history’s most haunted houses, they uncover not only painfully real ghosts but also life’s sweetly absurd props—a stuffed sloth named Keats, a Forever 21 shirt that says “What boyfriend?,” an Oreo shake, or some Peppermint International Delight creamer. Which is to say: there is sadness here, where “being gay/is fucking lonely a veces,” but there is also the exquisite sparkle of a speaker who is tired of hiding it. These poems will break your heart with their defiant beauty, like the wildflowers that grow on scarred earth after a fire.

–Cecily Parks, author of The Seeds

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SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer and organizer. They are the Poetry Editor of Abode Press, a Roots.Wounds.Words. Fellow, and Tin House alum. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks and the nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press 2025). Their work has appeared in Honey Literary, The Offing, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com, or in Tejas with their partner and cats, working towards liberation for oppressed peoples everywhere. They believe Palestine will be free from the river to the sea. They encourage you to find tangible ways to support Palestinian liberation.