Texas, Being: A State of Poemscollects more than forty-five poems from a beautiful and brutal state. Some are about the music of their languages. Some speak to the dead, some to the sun, and others to omissions of history. One concerns a hedgehog cactus, and another a roller rink. From Happy, Texas to Palestine, TX, from seashores to skeletons to Selena, all are in one way or another about Texas, but good poems are always about more than one thing.

Selected by Jenny Browne,2017 poet laureate of Texas,these poems draw a picture of one of Americas vastly sublime yet most audaciously independent corners. In these diverse voices, the state is a lovely and painful contradiction of space and meaning. Texas is a place where blind catfish cruise and wild asters grow. Its a frame of mind where Jenny Boully writes the history is unending and Mexican American studies professor Christopher Carmona can feel the slowness of time. Jorge Luis Borges wrote of it as an endless plain / Where a mans cry dies a lonely death. Victoria Chang writes that there is so / much sky that even birds / get lost.”