If ‘Crying on the Blue Line Trolley’ is a purely audiovisual exercise in the process of encapsulating the melancholic tenderness in the zeitgeist of the border region, the chapbook, ‘My Mother on the Other Side of the Pool, Calling Me Back to Her Wet Arms’ is her sister, a literary expansion that becomes an explicitly personal autobiography.

This nine-poem collection thrives on its honesty. Hernandez’s frank narrative is not concerned with the grandiose or the particularly memorable, but rather with the unnoticed and the small. It has no other purpose but to be diaristic, an observational retelling of the poet’s tumultuous relationship with Catholicism, emotional manipulation, sexual assault and a desire to transgress the oppressions of her surroundings.