Eat the Mouth That Feeds You Spiral-Bound | March 30, 2021
Carribean Fragoza
Eat the Mouth That Feeds You
In gritty, sometimes fantastical stories about Latinx life, women challenge feminine stereotypes and make sense of fractured family histories.
WINNER OF THE WHITING AWARD
PEN AMERICA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST
Recommended by Héctor Tobar as an essential Los Angeles book in the New York Times.
Carribean Fragoza's debut collection of stories reside in the domestic surreal, featuring an unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, and universes beyond.
"Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is an accomplished debut with language that has the potential to affect the reader on a visceral level, a rare and significant achievement from a forceful new voice in American literature."—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, New York Times Book Review, and author of Sabrina and Corina
Carribean Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family’s beloved lime tree.
Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women's wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
"Eat the Mouth that Feeds You renders the feminine grotesque at its finest."—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
"Eat the Mouth that Feeds You will establish Fragoza as an essential and important new voice in American fiction."—Héctor Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries
"Fierce and feminist, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is a soul-quaking literary force."—Dontaná McPherson-Joseph, The Foreword, *Starred Review
". . . a work of power and a darkly brilliant talisman that enlarges in necessary ways the feminist, Latinx, and Chicanx canons."—Wendy Ortiz, Alta Magazine
"Fragoza's surreal and gothic stories, focused on Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women's voices, are sure to surprise and move readers."—Zoe Ruiz, The Millions
"This collection of visceral, often bone-chilling stories centers the liminal world of Latinos in Southern California while fraying reality at its edges. Full of horror and wonder."—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review
"Fragoza's debut collection delivers expertly crafted tales of Latinx people trying to make sense of violent, dark realities. Magical realism and gothic horror make for effective stylistic entryways, as Fragoza seamlessly blurs the lines between the corporeal and the abstract."—Publishers Weekly
"The magic realism of Eat the Mouth that Feeds You is thoroughly worked into the fabric of the stories themselves . . . a wonderful debut."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
"Stop whatever you’re doing, and pick up Carribean Fragoza's strange and wonderful and Goth-grotesque short story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You . . . I have marinated in so many of her dark and poetic lines: 'It was that other me, the shadow me that I had never truly seen, except in glimpses in the corner of my eye, where they say your furtive death hides until it's the right time.'"—Carolina Miranda, Los Angeles Times
"Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, by Carribean Fragoza, tastes like resistance; she's f*cking fed-up with fighting. . . . Fragoza's lush and dreamy fabulist fiction, might just be what turns out to be most real."—Anjanette Delgado, Women's Review of Books
"A thorough, imaginative investigation into the profound and sometimes undesirable ways we are shaped by family and place.”—Josie Tolin, Fiction Writers Review
"Simply put, this electrifying book may cement Fragoza’s legacy in the canon of Chicanx/Latinx literature as the visceral stories dance off the pages."—Marian Perales, Latino Book Review
"Maybe you thought it was impossible. That it didn't exist. You would never find a contemporary short story collection that was more than well written. . . . . there is more feminist subtext here than there is displacement angst, a fitting language and tone for the current state of women’s issues, all the black humor, the irony, and stranger-than-fiction scenarios right at home here among the fairy tales gone wrong and the fables exposed for the patriarchal propaganda they always were. . . . What you can call it, is genius."—Anjanette Delgado, New York Journal of Books
"This transnational story collection full of magical realism and gothic elements centers on women who are trying to reclaim their lives and step into their power."—Gwen Aviles, Shelf Awareness, *Starred review
"Eat the Mouth That Feeds You by Carribean Fragoza is ferocious, gothic, utterly fantastic, and unabashedly Chicanx. The short stories in this collection are grotesque, heartbreaking, bizarre, beautiful and full of wonder. Fathers are often absent and Mothers—their grief, pain and fortitude—are the foundation of many of these stories with the children being the harbinger of change, hope and destruction. The stories will slice you in two. The prose in this collection feels so terrifically tight that reading these stories feels like an unraveling. If you read The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, then I strongly suggest you read this magnificent book."—Michelle Malonzo, Changing Hands Bookstore, Phoenix, AZ
"Fragoza's prose, a switchblade of a magical glow, cauterizes as it cuts. In a setting of barren citrus trees, poison-filled balloons, and stuccos haunted by the menace of the past, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You reinvents the sunny noir."—Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper
"I felt this collection deep in my bones. Like the Chicanx women whose voices she centers, Carribean Fragoza's writing doesn’t flinch. It is sharp and dream-like, tender-hearted and brutal, carved from the violence and resilience of generations past and present."—Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home
"Mothers guard and whisper their ancestral heritage to their daughters, hitting up against a history of abusive men who break their own homes. The female body becomes the shield and scythe that challenges patriarchal threat; sometimes it bleeds and sometimes it resuscitates from male brutality. But almost always female characters in Fragoza’s universe flex, chop, and levitate their way past men they no longer need. In ten tightly crafted stories, Fragoza presents a series of near-oral tradition narratives that lace vulnerability with strength and wounds with survival" —Michael Adam Carroll, Ploughshares
"Carribean Fragoza goes deep. This book makes central the lives of women, whether sourced locally or rooted in Mexico, whether alive or dead to the world, surrealistic or hyper realistic, in the flesh or as spirits centuries old. This is storytelling that astonishes . . . "—Sesshu Foster, author of Atomik Aztex
"In a short story collection as fierce and strange as the title might indicate, Fragoza brings to life the wants and worries of a chorus of Latina and Chicanas in the kind of magical-realist-gone-dark way that’s come to reflect the realities of life along the border. A daughter takes bites out of her mother, a mother takes an axe to everything in her house, and 'Sabado Gigante' goes from mindless weekend TV to a chance to escape everything in this haunting and strange collection."—Alejandra Oliva, Remezcla
"Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You uplifts Latina and immigrant women protagonists who confront the culmination of historic and machismo violence."—Catherine Lisette Gonzalez, Colorlines
"This collection establishes Carribean Fragoza as a new American voice to be reckoned with—her invigoratingly imaginative stories are nothing short of brilliant."— J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota
"As someone who loves a healthy mix of tenderness, fabulism, and brutality in my short stories—and who adored Sabrina & Corina—I'm positive this will be a fave of mine for 2021!" –Serena Morales, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, NY
"Carribean Fragoza's writing is exciting and alive. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You gripped me from page one."—Emma Ramadan, Riffraff Bookstore, Providence, RI
"Carribean Fragoza’s writing is passionate and precise. Her gorgeously goth book of short fiction, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, is coming out from City Lights Publishers in March."—Yxta Maya Murray, Poets and Writers Magazine
"Eat the Mouth That Feeds You treats readers to gem after gem of interesting, provocative, impossible writing."—Michael Sedano, La Bloga
The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Carribean Fragoza was raised in South El Monte, California. After graduating from UCLA, Fragoza completed the Creative Writing MFA Program at CalArts, where she worked with writers Douglas Kearney and Norman Klein. Today, Fragoza co-edits UC Press's acclaimed California cultural journal, Boom California, and is also the founder of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She is a senior writer at Tropics of Meta Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared numerous publications, including BOMB, Huizache, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, published February 2020 by Rutgers University Press.