Unbound Spotlight: Jose Oseguera’s Poetic Exploration of Family and Identity
A showcase of bold, necessary, and transformative writing.
Unbound: A showcase of bold, necessary, and transformative writing.
Unbound is a recurring feature showcasing new writing and essential poetry—works that challenge, inspire, and redefine the art of language.
Unbound Spotlight: And This House is Only a Nest by Jose Oseguera
Imagine standing in front of a house that isn’t quite balanced, its walls heavy with memory, its rooms echoing with voices that never learned to whisper. In And This House is Only a Nest, poet Jose Oseguera invites us inside—a place where childhood was more survival than innocence, where an abuelo’s presence loomed large, casting shadows long enough to shape a man.
But this isn’t a tale of blame or bitterness. It’s a journey of transformation, of reckoning with the past and choosing what to carry forward. Through vivid, unflinching language, Oseguera captures moments that linger: three kids, two strikes, and a father watching from behind prison bars. “Realistic scenes rendered like Dutch paintings,” writes Gary Soto, each poem is a snapshot of life as it was—a life that somehow made room for hope.
These poems don’t just tell stories; they reveal truths you didn’t know you were waiting to hear. Elizabeth MacDuffie (Meat For Tea, The Valley Review) urges us to “take heed: ‘When you do find your wolf, don’t be so quick to kill it...instead, put your knife away, and listen.’” And that’s what this collection asks of us: to listen, to see the beauty in the struggle, to understand the love woven through even the most painful memories.
Oseguera knows these stories because he’s lived them. Named one of the Sixty Four Best Poets of 2019 by Black Mountain Press, his words have graced the pages of Chautauqua, Sonora Review, and more. But it’s his lived experience—the abuelo who was more storm than shelter, the neighborhood that demanded resilience—that gives this book its heartbeat.
And This House is Only a Nest is for anyone who has ever had to leave parts of themselves behind to grow, who has struggled to reconcile the past with the person they’re becoming. It’s for fathers and sons, for those who’ve searched for role models only to find them in the mirror.
Ready to step inside this house of memory and metaphor? Order your copy today wherever books are sold and discover the nest Jose Oseguera has built from words and wisdom. / Order in our store to support indie artists.
Read a poem from the collection below.
From Where I Stand
So I’m off on the road that I see might be coming and those dreams that I hold all for this child of mine. —The Road by Zero 7
You’re not the shoes— the skin or the sole—
the toes, the metatarsals or cuneiforms
or any bone, muscle or sinew in the foot;
you’re not the callus, thickening yellow
with every step, stride and shockwave up the tibia,
or the sweat that swaddles the ankle
as a wet nurse who removes the calico from her breast
to suckle another’s baby.
You’re not the legs—
the splints that tingle down the shins and calves
like a line of ants on a flower’s calyx—
or wanderlust, or any impulse or motion that propels
someone from the beginning to the end,
you’re not what lies ahead or is left behind,
the light born in the east like a golden chalice
or the darkness that consumes its ambrosia in the west;
you’re not the sun that follows the walker
as a leashed dog or the moon that hides in the dark like a cat
only to reveal itself flat and empty
like famine on a plate,
white chipped porcelain in the sky;
you’re not hunger or thirst,
the waybread or warm canteen water;
you’re not the garbage whirling past,
possessed with the immediacy of someone with somewhere to go;
you’re not the trip or the fall, the autumn, the shade
or whatever it is that makes the leaves turn brown and take flight;
no, when someone asks you what it’s like to be a parent,
you tell them that it’s like being the road—
dust, dirt and everything that’s stepped on—
bumps and cracks for stumbling,
suggestions that stray away from the path.
But as the graying ashes remember the heat of the fire,
and the moon nurses the caliches wrought on her flesh by earth,
will I too remember the indentations left behind by his first steps?
His destination, bluntly wedged in clay,
is a cuneiform written in motion and gravity
illegible from where I stand.
About the Author
Jose Oseguera is the author of the poetry collection The Milk of Your Blood (Kelsay Books). His poems have appeared in Chautauqua, Sonora Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Catamaran and elsewhere. He was named one of the Sixty Four Best Poets of 2019 by the Black Mountain Press. He was the recipient of the Nancy Dew Taylor Award in 2019 and placed 2nd in the 2020 Hal Prize Contest. His writing has been nominated for the Best of the Net award (2018, twice in 2019) as well as the Pushcart (2018 - 2020) and Foreword (2020) Prizes.
