About Brandon Som
Brandon Som (born August 13, 1975) is an American poet born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. He is of Mexican and Chinese descent. His collections include The Tribute Horse (2014): winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2015, and Tripas: Poems (2023).Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry with Tripas, Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a cómo se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem’s ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of “telephone” between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som’s lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise—one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale.
Browse all poems and texts published on Brandon Som
Being a poet, for me, is an ongoing process. It’s been my experience that realizing I’m a poet is poem-by-poem; realizing that I am a poet feels very much tied to the realization of the next poem. Rather than saying “I am a poet,” I often tell people that “I work on poems.” I identify with the labor of making poetry, that feels closer to my experience.
