Burn Me Back

New Book!

Burn Me Back is a collection of poems that transforms grief into resilience through what Peggy Robles-Alvarado calls working-class wisdom. Rooted in verbivocovisual poetics, Latina narrative, and family lore, these poems navigate the Puerto Rican and Dominican diasporas, colonialism, patriarchy, and displacement while reclaiming memory and identity.

This collection is both intimate and unflinching, tracing the landscapes of love, survival, and sobriety with language that burns and heals in equal measure. With a voice that is unapologetically fierce and tender, Robles-Alvarado invites readers to witness the power of story as a form of resistance and remembrance, reimagining the future from the ashes of loss.

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A Starred Review:

A starred review from BOOKLIST indicating a work judged to be outstanding in its genre!

By Peggy Robles-Alvarado
Sept. 2025. 160p. Four Way, paper, $17.95 (9781961897663); e-book (9781961897670). 811

Puertorriqueña Dominican poet and performer Robles-Alvarado brings her punchy, powerful voice to the page in a collection that cracks open wounds of sexual violence, confronts family alcoholism, and moves toward recovery in sensual, intimate lyrics. In darkly simmering poems, Robles-Alvarado speaks from the perspective of a sober grown woman and in the voice of an “unruly child who touches everything that can burn me,” one who learned lessons of love and heartbreak at an early age. An astute surveyor of the heart’s geography, she describes young lovers with bracing intimacy (“her body is a road map to his God” and “Only he knows how to translate the architecture of her spine”), but she also sees extended family members who “drowned in whiskey all that was sour and renamed it satisfaction.” Spanish and English intermingle in lyrics that catch tropical rainfall pelting a zinc roof, luxuriate in the scents of mango and tamarind, and bare teeth at rum-soaked uncles; “My Spanglish carries a Gillette under her tongue.” In “Coke No Rum” and “When Asked Why I Don’t Drink,” Robles-Alvarado circles her own embrace of sobriety in a way that balances the knife’s edge of vengeance and forgiveness.

Poems that bristle with fire and life.

— Diego Báez

Publisher: Four Way Books

Publication Details
Release Date: September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-66-3  /  eISBN: 978-1-961897-67-0
Poetry • 160 pages • $17.95 • 6 x 9

Four Way Books
PO Box 535
Village Station, New York, NY 10014

publicity@fourwaybooks.com / editors@fourwaybooks.com

Orders
Chicago Distribution Center
orders@press.uchicago.edu

Praises!

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Let us begin by declaring that Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a magic maker.

Her poetry plows under your skin until you feel your soul brimming with epiphanies. In Burn Me Back, Robles-Alvarado invites us to party with the machinations of truth-telling, and no matter how much you try to avert its gaze, there is enough lyric, enough innovative turn of phrase, enough history, enough fire, enough celestial invocation, enough family lore to make you a believer in rebirth, in salvaging what is left in the aftermath of a lineage fractured by secrets. If you ever doubted poetry’s ability to make you whole, welcome to this sublime reckoning.

     – Willie Perdomo, The Crazy Bunch

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Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s Burn Me Back sings with the gale force of Oyá and Guabancex, its verbivocovisual spell encompassing fractured lyric narrative, performance score, experimental process writing, concrete poetry, and Afro-Latina testimonio. Come for the rhythmic dazzle, fierce wit, Spanglish glyphs, and mujerista erotics, and stay for the diasporic world-building, rooted in working class New York Puerto Rican and Dominican histories and all their hard-earned wisdom. This book is unflinching in its reckoning with cross-generational violence and trauma as they connect to patriarchy, colonialism, and displacement, yet it also claims the performalist power (translingual acrostics, yo!) to forge a somatic language as untranslatable and expansive as our bodyminds (“reteach my bones to speak survival”). Robles-Alvarado is an essential figure in Nueva York poetry and performance and Burn Me Back is her best work yet, a virtuosic primer on survival as a shared creative practice of “liberación and pleasure” that demands new ways of reading and meaning.

     – Urayoán Noel, Writer, Translator, and Performer.

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We want. And that want blisters within us. Peggy Robles Alvarado’s profoundly hopeful book, Burn Me Back, finds a steady beat (el son, la clave) of the fires within us: what we light to dispose of, what lights within us. She teaches me to discern, to write beyond my own limits and the limits of a poem, where the world scorches in its memory. These exceptional poems of life, for life, are a dress of fire and ashes for all of us who want to learn our own geography, who want to keep us safe and save ourselves, who feed each other that tenderness among our own fires.

          – Ricardo Maldonado

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Peggy Robles-Alvarado’s new collection, Burn Me Back, is a testament to the epidemic of American colonial sicknesses enacted over generations in the Caribbean and its diasporas and the strength it takes to heal. Though she begins the collection with her father’s alcoholism, she does not end there, taking us on a familial and personal journey of migration, economic exploitation, anti-blackness, misogyny, xenophobia, (mis)education, pressures of assimilation, sexual assault, loss, and restoration. Perhaps Robles-Alvarado’s most personal collection yet for a poet who is no stranger to vulnerability, each poem in the collection pulls you forward with her unique mix of narrative, intoxicating imagery, and metaphor. In poems that also show mastery of various poetic forms, you are in the delivery room, the living room, the schoolyard, and the sweatshop. You will both want to rush forward to the next poem and linger indefinitely, in order to fully savor and grasp lines about home, language, gender, grief, and more. The most stunning poetry collection I have read in many years, this will immediately be a centerpiece of my teaching.

     – Dr. Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Associate Professor of English, Lehman College & Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of the award-winning collection, Chingona Rules

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Burn Me Back is a poetry collection that I’ve been eagerly waiting for. These poems are petroglyphs etched by a poet who knows something about brown girls made from fire. From Santiago, DR to Puerto Rico to the Bronx, Robles-Alvarado’s searing verses unearth matrilineal lineages across borders, gendered bodies, and bloodlines. What we hear is the weight of it all through the tender eyes of a daughter making sense of the world around her. In one poem she writes, “My tongue: / always the unsteady bridge / for an immigrant mother who waits / for me to explain / if my country will allow her / to call it home too.” Using repetition as a spell to undo and reclaim, I felt myself pulled into the mouth of inherited stories as Robles-Alvarado explores which ones to keep and which ones to let burn. Simply put, this is a collection I’ll be living alongside for a long time.

    – Denice Frohman Poet and Performer

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In Burn Me Back, poet Peggy Robles-Alvarado delivers a poetry collection that is a multidimensional gem refracting the beauty and light of an immigrant daughter’s journey. Each page glows with poetic prose that resonates in the spirit and catches fire in the imagination. As a gifted poet, Peggy doesn’t merely write—she summons language and her ancestors into breath and form. The collection explores universal themes of identity, struggle, joy, ancestry, and resilience with a lyrical grace that never sacrifices clarity and realness. These poems navigate the liminal spaces between belonging and exclusion, trauma and healing, silence and voice. There are striking moments of rage and clarity—particularly in poems that chart out the confusion and shame experienced by many of her poetic muses. In her brilliance, Peggy’s poetry breathes with the pulse of lived experience, unsettling truths, and nostalgic soul-piercing moments. From the quiet magic of ordinary objects that frame longing and desire—hidden within a dandelion, paper, and tea—to the charged, transcendental urban spaces of fire escapes, alleyways, and hallways. Poet Robles-Alvarado reveals how she maneuvered systems that were never built for her. Yet alongside the ache is immense beauty and fire—it offers the point of view of a stoic daughter that served as a mystical bridge between many worlds. She honored them while forging a path and voice of her own. Her poetic prose will resonate in your spirit and you will never be the same!

     – Dr. Vilma Luz Cabán, Author/ Educator/ Publishing House CEO, Casa de Maria Publishers

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“My Spanglish,” Peggy Robles-Alvarado declares, “drops the -s and makes it ma’ o meno’,” replaces accent marks with side-eye, “has a Tía sin papeles,” and recognizes that “there is no other way to say— / Cónchole papi, you look good!” Igniting across tongues, cultures, and countries, the incendiary poems in Burn Me Back harness the incantatory power of language through hybrid forms, preserving a beloved father’s memory, enshrining the legacy of the Latino immigrant community in Washington Heights and the Bronx, reimagining the world we share, and speaking toward a hopeful multiplicity of possible futures. At the cross section of Puerto Rican and Dominican diasporas, rooted in ancestral narratives and infused with generational dislocation, this speaker refuses to abandon what resists translation, makes the space she needs, and transforms objects as she names them: “My Spanglish knows a fire escape is also a terrace.” Yes, the language here is a feat of engineering — a design shaped by the conditions of emergency, an architecture of survival, deliverance to open air. Like isolating the notes in a thunderous chord, Robles-Alvarado dexterously teases out each word’s many meanings, listening for the individual strains that created her as she archives family lore and fleshes out her personal history, writing against patriarchy while codifying working-class wisdom. She reconstructs a whole genealogy in “What They Mean by Papers,” reciting a negative litany of “papeles.” “Not the Daily News or El Diario La Prensa, / or the kind my mother read to me on Sunday / mornings,” her “throat full of / pelitos de mango,” “Not the kind Tía Weltina used to roll her tobacco with,” “conjuring / Taíno spirits she exhaled … as she tried to memorize the national anthem,” but the kind “Uncle Rito forged” while he “learned to curl the R in his name / as if writing sacred geometry,” “the kind that convinced four of my aunts to marry older / naturalized men in exchange for an acre of my grandfather’s campo” — the kind that required the rest of their lives as payment, “their bodies, / all their milk and honey, all their amber and caña dulce / sacrificed to the lust of viejos verdes, old bastards / who soured early on too much tabaco y ron and wanted to plant / their moldy seeds in supple girls who had never seen snow.” Robles-Alvarado orchestrates the fullness of her song by refusing to leave anyone out, by making room for a term’s contradictory definitions and playing through discordant combinations until the dissonance resolves. What began as an elegy composed by a daughter lost in mourning becomes an expansive arrangement sounding rupture and repair. This music travels between loss and recovery, addiction and sobriety, the cooling embers of lost childhood and the heat of the present, this very moment in which you could reach out to the people around you and ask them to be here with you for every scalding second, the warmth of your skin against theirs posing a burning question — an invitation to burn you back.

     – Hannah Matheson, Four Way Books