"With Un Mango Grows in Kansas poet Huascar Medina redirects our generational sense of place to illuminate the possibilities and the promises that place holds. He reimagines Kansas, the Midwest, the Americas, and the stars by expanding our perspective and examining our routines and our over mapped corners. Medina guides us through this new American journey reaffirming that our struggles with love, infatuation, obsession, loss, death, family, self, and other are, like the mango seed itself, necessary and beautiful and without them, it would never be as sweet."
-Miguel M. Morales, poet, co-editor of Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando.
"Un Mango Grows in Kansas -exactly where it should, amongst the flowers and the hidden bones de un futuro no muy lejano. Huascar Medina's anthology transports you to a forgotten isla where he refuses to let you forget what it is to live so far and yet so close to home. In this, not so alternate universe, grillos, remordimientos y humedad thrive and we -the readers- are left with bellies full of seeds of a less bitter tomorrow."
-Alex Martinez, author, organizer
"Huascar's book is full of ordinary magic, of seeing the sublime in the everyday, and that makes this book a true joy to read. Speaking of mangos, Huascar writes, 'Fruit flies are angels born in their own kind of heaven.' This is that kind of book, something sweet to savor--full of revelations and culture, observations and human unity."
--Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas (2017-2019), On Drums
"Huascar Medina's Un Mango Grows in Kansas contains a lyric catalog of losses but also the joy that comes from carrying our islands and ancestors with us. These poems of grief and celebration feature all the elsewheres of Kansas, as well as Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul and the mango orchards of Puerto Rico. In this bilingual collection, Medina says "Only Neruda can save us," and like Neruda, Medina seamlessly blends the high and the low, the heaven of fruit flies, the blush of resurrected bones, the messy and necessary resurrections of love."
-Traci Brimhall
