Emmy Pérez's harrowing, beautiful sonnet sequence takes up the long question of what poetry can do in the face of deep suffering. Witnessing the escalation of border violences, she tells us: "If they built their wall near you, you'd think / music left for rhetoric too." Pérez wrestles with the monarchy inherent in a "crown" of sonnets, undoing the container of the inherited form-those boxes-while showing how the real-world boxes built by the census, ICE, and empire work to erase and deform human experience. Her lines hurt in the way they should, in the way that borders do. In a country with "signatures more 'legal' than // people," who is listened to? who is seen as needing comfort? who is recognized as fully human? While her work invites us into witness and empathy, the poem knows it is a waystation. Its ultimate hope is for a world where immigrants and survivors have the agency to tell their own stories. I would be grateful for this stunning chapbook at any time. Right now, it feels like a deep call to notice, to care, to sing, and to protest.

-Sasha West, author of How to Abandon Ship.