Jon Pineda

Mason Boyd, aka “Main Boy,” is from a nearby affluent neighbourhood where he and his raucous friends ride around in tricked-out golf carts, shoot their fathers’ shotguns, and aspire to make Internet pranking videos. While Pearl is out scavenging in the woods, she meets Main Boy, who eventually reveals that his father has purchased the property on which Pearl and the others are squatting. With all the power in Main Boy’s hands, an unbalanced relationship forms between the two, culminating in a devastating scene of violence and humiliation. Huck Finn meets We the Animals in this dreamy yet urgent Southern Gothic tale, 'classic coming-of-age novel that lingers with the reader long after the last page' (Booklist, starred review)

The third collection by the prize-winning Asian American poet Jon Pineda, Little Anodynes is a sequence of lyrical, personal narratives that continue Pineda’s exploration of his biracial identity, the haunting loss of his sister, and the joys - and fears - of fatherhood. With its title inspired by Emily Dickinson, Little Anodynes offers its poems as “respites,” as breaks in the reader’s life that serve as opportunities for discovery and healing. Pineda deftly uses shortened lines and natural pauses to create momentum, which allows the poems to play out in a manner evocative of fine cinema, as if someone had left a projector running and these narratives were flickering and blending endlessly in an experience shared by the viewer, the storyteller, and the story itself.

Poetry. Winner of the 2007 Green Rose Prize. "In THE TRANSLATOR'S DIARY, where truth 'never survives its translation, ' Jon Pineda composes a haunting elegy. His keen attention journeys through absence and presence, fragmentation and loss in memorable, riveting language"--Arthur Sze. "THE TRANSLATOR'S DIARY reminds us that one of poetry's necessary functions is translation--of literal experience and abstract emotion, the personal and shared. With beautiful formal precision, Pineda moves skillfully from couplets to sonnets to lyric sequence, carefully 'pressing syllables against the dark' in this timeless, poignant volume"--Claudia Emerson

In Jon Pineda’s debut collection Birthmark, loss takes the shape of a scar, memory the shape of a childhood, and identity the shape of a birthmark on a lover’s thigh. Like water taking the form of its container, Pineda’s poems swell to fill the lines of his experiences. Against the backdrop of Tidewater, Virginia’s crabs and cicadas, Pineda invokes his mestizo—the Tagalog word for being half Filipino—childhood, weaving laments for a tenuous paternal relationship and the loss of a sibling. Channeling these fragmented memories into a new discovery of self, Birthmark reclaims an identity, delicate yet unrelenting, with plaintive tones marked equally by pain, reflection, and redemption.