McTlán by Steven Alvarez
McTlán is the sequel to Steven Alvarez's Codex Mojaodicus, a Xicanx mythopoetic dream cycle journey spiraling into histories, geographies, and langscapes of the Americas.
In this novel in verse, protagonist Chaley Chastitellez journeys deep into the underworld of McTlán and into visions of destinies that prefigure disgorged, decolonial codices of three generations.
In McTlán, Chaley reckons with the ghosts of his ancestors and also the toxic masculinity of their ‘chero ways. Alvarez assembles layers of artifacts that span the hemisphere, across borders between genres, forms, and languages.
Alvarez goes on a sick one to gift us a tall can wrapped in a brown bag collection. McTlán relentlessly journeys into the underworld to reclaim the ancient and dismantle the present. From the visual glyphs to the sprawling “slanguage” tongues of La Muerte, La Llorona, Tlāloc, and those submerged in the “Amurkan” empire, Alvarez embodies the grand-channeler able to see anew, lest you, the reader, “find yrself muy dead.” Here, is the “(m)Al Norte” ideal exposed, unique to the vision and hallucination that only Alvarez can summon.
-Anthony Cody, author of Borderland Apocrypha winner of a 2021 American Book Award