For Gonzalez, the glory and the trauma of moving from the Dominican Republic to New York City awakens a special sensitivity to the strained duality of hope and loss. This resilience, this mercy offered to those who become displaced while still in the formative adolescent years, manifests itself as wisdom, premature but striking. The different textures in this collection—the soliloquy, the notebook, the fairy tale, the prose poem—evidence a gifted and promising writer who can maneuver through an poetic avenue and sparkle.

— Rigoberto González

Octavio Gonzalez has written a brave and memorable first collection of poems chronicling his early life in Santo Domingo and coming of age in New York City. The poems in The Book of Ours emerge out of a difficult and painful personal history (a childhood in a city “packed with wolves, thirsty and close”) to sing “with brokenated tongue” a distinctive and beautiful music—playful and risky, tough and tender, and true. Here is a bold, promising new voice.

— Deborah Landau