Bury My Heart Under the Martian Sky by Juan Manuel Pérez
Interstellar Flight Press (April 6, 2026)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Juan Manuel Pérez, a Mexican-American poet of indigenous descent and the current Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi, Texas (2019-2020), is the author of Another Menudo Sunday (2007), O’ Dark Heaven: A Response to Suzette Haden Elgin’s Definition of Horror (2009), WUI: Written Under the Influence of Trinidad Sanchez, Jr. (2011), Live From La Pryor: The Poetry of Juan Manuel Perez: A Zavala Country Native Son, Volume 1 (2014), Sex, Lies, and Chupacabras (2015), Space In Pieces (2020), and Screw The Wall! And Other Brown People Poems (2020), as well as, the co-editor of The Call Of The Chupacabra (2018). He is the 2011-2012 San Antonio Poets Association Poet Laureate and the Lone Star State’s only El Chupacabras Poet Laureate (For Life). The former Gourd Dancer for the Memphis Tia Piah Big River Clan Warrior Society is also a Pushcart Prize Nominee as well as a SEATTAH Scholar (Striving For Excellence And Accountability In The Teaching Of Traditional American History) through the University Of Dallas. His newest collection is Bury My Heart Under the Martain Sky.
Bury My Heart Under the Martain Sky is a collection of deliberately anti-academic, anti-intellectual, anti-research poems. Rather than ground his poems in English Language Haiku tradition, he deliberately writes within the 5-7-5 mode, eschewing the research and scholarship of “white-tenured English professors.” His “crowns,” which resemble Japanese gunsaku and rensaku, read not as collections of individual haiku, but actually seven stanza syllabic poems. The content attempts Indigenous Futurism, but more often than not, in his attempt to tilt against academia, Pérez is forced to participate in the very clichés and stereotypes he’s protesting.
Take, for example, the following haiku from “Godzilla at the Pow-Wow”:
drumbeat, drumbeat, drum
a deep, rhythmic rumbling sound
music from the heart
or
dancing for his life
dancing for it is sacred
dancing for prayer
which are merely abstractions poured into an outer shell. The lack of specific, authentic, nuanced imagery only serves to make these poems stereotypes and one-dimensional caricatures, rather than engaging moments culminating towards a larger narrative.
This, of course, is the point of Bury My Heart Under the Martain Sky. Juan Manuel Pérez is deliberately writing anti-poetry in the face of academia and “intellectual biases.” As an author, his position is that poetry and poetic forms are “whatever he says they are, and [readers] should shut up about it already.” This is the tone that overrides the collection, one of determined defiance and rage. Rather than use the tools of haiku to convey his message, Pérez’s goals are to deliberately shatter those tools in protest and demand that the ruins be seen as poetry, too. More often than not, that extreme rejection of poetic standards leads to work that simply doesn’t read as poetry, merely cliches and abstractions poured into syllabic molds. As a reader, if you’re in on this kind of joke and find anti-academia and anti-intellectualism in poetry worth pursuing, then this collection will be perfect for your collection; most readers, however, will be expecting more from a poetry collection and will want to pass on this book.
