Bilingual Bitch by Angelica Davila is the sixth chapbook in Abode's 2024-2025 lineup and is officially available for pre-order! All orders will be shipped by mid March. There are only 100 copies of this chapbook available, so make sure to get your copy while you can!
Book Description: Angelica Julia Davila's Bilingual Bitch explores the complexities of being Mexican yet growing up in the United States through multilingual expression, generational conflict, and longing for a homeland while existing in a limbo. With a sharp tongue that disrupts both English and Spanish, Davila's poems document familial and US/Mexican history through oral knowledge and chisme while lamenting lost histories. Bilingual Bitch is for the pochas everywhere who find themselves always wondering “which country” is their country.
About the Author: Angelica Julia Dàvila is a writer, performer, and self-advocate. She is currently a PhD Candidate at the Program for Writers at University of Illinois at Chicago. She writes fiction, poetry, and essays and has recently dived into sketch. Her work is an exploration of the Latinx and bilingual identity, autistic self-expression, and mental borderlands. Angelica is also a comedian, improviser, and co-producer of “Antojitos Fest: Chicago’s Latin American Comedy Festival” and the monthly Latinx variety show “La Hora de Antojitos” at Logan Square Improv Theater in Chicago.
Praise for Bilingual Bitch by Angelica Dàvila:
"In Bilingual Bitch, Angelica Julia Davila embodies both colonized and colonizer, abused and abuser, victim and perp. Davila writes with wild hybridity, creating new rhythms for navigating the haphazard grammar of an imperfect pocha, "mixing English and Spanish, pero not / quite Spanglish either, just incorrect español." Davila's lyrics hiss and stomp, thrash and slice their way into a voice that balances on the knife's edge of borderlands identity: between languages, between nations, and always armed with incisive interrogation: "Every morning I read my country’s history of death, / which country?" Read Davila to know what's next in Latine poetics."
—Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White (Univ of Arizona, 2024)
"Reminiscent of the poetry of Vanessa Angélica Villarreal and the sounds of Snow Tha Product, Bilingual Bitch puts serrano peppers on the cuts left by 'E.E.U.U.S.A.' Against the foreign museum of assimilation, Angelica Julia Davila's pocha poems invade English and reclaim the daily crossings of memory, of family, of history that make home."
—Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario/ the tertiary and Algarabía
"With vibrancy and verve, poignancy, discipline, and wit, Angelica Davila's new collection Bilingual Bitch speaks to us in multiple tongues about how communities and individuals live with the horrors and accidents of history. Bilingualism here is not just a question of language; it is also about how we live and build and suffer and dream. These powerful poems ask us to imagine the myriad ways that tongues cross, that they are stubborn and forceful and alive."
—Daniel Borzutzky
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-5-6
Publication Date: 3/15/2025
Copies will officially be distributed on March 15th, 2025.