Michael Caylo-Baradi

Hotel Pacoima Michael Caylo-Baradi

"A hail of angels hovers on the margins of a story, / restless for the moral center of its myth." In these two lines, Michael Caylo-Baradi gives us a key to entering his poems. The poet lives as much as he can live in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, which has no geographical center, let alone a moral center. How does one love? Where is L. A. nature? L. A. beauty? In Hotel Pacoima , we're given to see the new, rare forms that love and nature and beauty can take.

-Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior (Author)

"First, we push the children into their games and giggles, to insulate them from obscenities circulating in the kitchen / [...] We never incriminate ourselves for murdering intransitive options / We just chew & masticate them at the dinner table, to fill the marrows of our fears" ("Upward Mobility"). In Michael Caylo-Baradi's Hotel Pacoima , the power of poetry allows savagery and tenderness to hold hands; gives evidence that an iconic mundane can down-size the profound. And warm moonlit waters welcome the brave suicidal. In this poetry collection, robust humanity mingles comfortably and dares to reside with the inevitable.

-Reme Grefalda, baring more than soul (Author)

The poems in Hotel Pacoima are grounded in geographies and places, whether these be named locations like LA or Tangier, or the more intimate spaces of home and family. Michael Caylo-Baradi's writing draws out the lyric potential embedded in all of these places, capable of making even a dumpsite into "a place of communion" ("Neighborhood Watch") for the reader.

-Ian Chung, Eunoia Review (Editor)