The poems in Misael Osorio-Conde’s debut collection some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo los Fragmentos engage with memory to reenact the cultural, psychological, and linguistic border-crossing that Osorio-Conde experienced as part of his formative years where he learned to live in the shadows of exile as well as a new language. Threading the needle between disclosure and acceptance, lyricism and narrative, and encapsulating new and inventive formal structures, the poems in some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo los Fragmentos attempt to make sense of Osorio-Conde’s crossing while grieving an indefinitely deferred return to his native land. The poems presented in this bilingual collection are built for our contemporary moment, while laced with the timeless realities, hardships, and most importantly, the successes, loves, family, and camaraderie that define human experience.
“Miraculously, Misael Osorio-Conde, has found forms—and an innovatively wide range of them—for a poetry of desertion, a poetry of abandonment, of sand and desert, of blood, of confusion. He has found forms for what is discarded, for garbage, for history and its terrors, for the illegible, for holes and wars, for suspension, for trains that ‘drag robots form their entrails,’ for shapelessness, for thirst, stones and survival. He writes with a multilingual fire of language, where a self-translation is never as simple as it seems because it has ‘no known original.’ ‘Boiling with snow,’ the Fragments/los Fragmentos is a poetry of continuous movement and the exhaustion and pain that comes with it. It’s an astonishingly powerful debut collection from a writer who is changing the art and language of migration.”
“Like Cesar Vallejo, his most obvious predecessor, Misael Osorio-Conde writes poetry that moves, vibrates, transforms. As Emerson wrote to Whitman, ‘This book makes me happy the way a great power makes one happy.'”
“In his debut collection, Misael Osorio-Conde slashes along the page with a bilingual tongue, dreams us through disaster, and honors the bones bundled along la frontera. Fed by memory, he gathers wisdom that emerges from the aching to go back and writes to outlast desperation, hunger, and silence, declaring, ‘still here / alive / figures in / a land smeared.’ This beautiful book of sandblasted poems evokes thirst and then quenches it with an ocean of powerful sparks.”
“In some were just the Fragments / es qué fueron sólo los Fragmentos, Misael Osorio-Conde conjures what he calls fuges: fugues and fugas—poetic flights that unravel quickly and sweep through everything like a dust storm. In this collection, Spanish and English do not simply translate into one another. They diverge across pages like the slippage of memory. They haunt, as ghosts do, in the shadows of who and what survives. Each body is an archive of what the border and the state try to erase. Osorio-Conde offers the desert as threshold, wound, village, a monumental burial ground. Sand is endless here; it is breath, and from its air the bones rise to speak— living and dead in perpetual dialogue. This is a shattering, feverish, and bold debut: ‘look at all that grass growing / from the mountains made with our garbage.’ Osorio-Conde offers not elegy but proof. Fragments endure, and the language refuses to settle or disappear, asking all of us ‘entonces cual es su teoria de liberacion?'”
An excerpt from some were just the Fragments // es que fueron solo los Fragmentos
Book Details
Title: some were just the Fragments // es que fueron solo los Fragmentos
Author: Misael Osorio-Conde
Publication Date: September 8, 2026
Trade Paperback
7 x 9 in.
126 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936097-70-8
$16.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
