Austin Araujo’s debut poetry collection At the Park on the Edge of the Country (Ohio State University Press) explores life at the intersections of immigration and naturalization, adulthood and childhood, understanding and apathy.
Using figurative language and descriptive imagery, the collection’s three sections separate poems into formal and thematic movements. The first section addresses borders, fatherhood and youth while the latter two sections interrogate personal identity more deeply and reflect on the legacies a family leaves through mindset and experience.
These poems are preoccupied with masculinity via the father figure, asking how the father can introduce a dynamic and disappear from sight entirely. In “Betting the House,” Araujo writes, “the project of loving him / won’t end.” In “The Father” he says, “You’re so big / you made me doubt you were mine. / It makes me think God must be tiny. / That we must tower over our inventors.”
Araujo is best when he’s long-winded and vulnerable. His sentences meander into one another and hold their breath, hold the reader hostage until they’ve made it to a pressing central image. In “Mexican in the Meadow,” Araujo returns to images of hands, of eyes, of vegetables, and of recovery beds, anchoring the poem with these images.
“I placed, when lost like this, / stalks of hay in my hands, twirled them like pens. // I’d pick cuticles.” Later he returns to this image in closing the poem, “And I, quiet, breathing slowly / knuckles picked open.” He saves these long, heavy poems, places them intermittently throughout the text, which makes them feel a little like reaching the landing between staircases.
The family-based reveries tease greater internal struggles for the poems’ narrator. While the shorter poems use language more plainly, they also employ more literary devices, and ask the reader to look a little more closely. Araujo’s descriptions are sparse, creating space where he sort of excavates visceral and surprising images. In “Mexican American Novel” we read, “I’m working out how he’ll talk / to lovers, but his legs will shake, bare but for goosebumps rising around / his knees. In the first paragraph, the boy presses a guitar into a cloth case. / By the end of the year, he’ll understand what symbolizes great human / suffering and what of the ordinary self remains.”
Araujo ends each of these shorter pieces with tidy, if not necessarily comfortable, stanzas. Often jarring, the audience cannot deny Araujo’s point and now must carry it for the rest of the day. He moves from metaphor to intention as in the poem “Another Look” in which he describes the movie The Thing and ends with, “A man is running / out of a building, snow / / crunching underfoot. He doesn’t / know if he’s still himself.”
At the Park on the Edge of the Country is an example of the variety of poetic forms and devices a poet can use while maintaining a single theme or message throughout their work. This collection is moved by image and identity, circling closer to its goal as it asks for meaning from itself.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s August 2025 issue.
