P R A I S E for KEEP YOUR LITTLE LIGHTS ALIVE

"Keep Your Little Lights Alive is a marvelous balance of moxie and tenderness, where poems take on the profound interiority of queerness, self-love and the pursuit of memory. Set against the iconic Kate Bush album, Hounds of Love, John-Francis Quiñonez writes of hunger, restoration and survival beneath a nostalgic haze, posing pointed questions that demand the speaker be seen for who they truly are: Do you not feel a Daughter’s fur in my hands? / Do you not know / how long / I can stay Quiet? Quiñonez’ poems exude a shameless curiosity, something rare and vital in the genre right now. Writers of intention aid us in our personal liberation, and Keep Your Little Lights Alive is indeed the lighthouse we can sprint towards."

- Rachel McKibbens

I will cook you the most brilliant egg / soft & running gold. 

This is every lover’s sweet threat, every morning’s promise of the sun’s return. Keep Your Little Lights Alive is, in and of itself, an aubade, offering its readers a warm glow after dark. John-Francis Quiñonez establishes intimacy through voice, image and through the romantics of the mundane. In this collection of poems, Quiñonez is a lover at the line, creating poems that quite literally dance down the page. Using Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love as muse, Quiñonez carves their own life desires in a literary tribute that invites readers to imagine themselves on the page. Keep Your Little Lights Alive is a dance, a plea, a love letter to the people we hold tightly on fleeting nights. Each poem in its own way,  lands soft on the ear and in the heart, as though they were, running gold. 

-Porsha Olayiwola, Poet Laureate , City of Boston 

author of i shimmer sometimes, too 

"I think these poems must be a love song. And the love is a self, or is a father, or a stranger, or a memory, depending on the moment or sometimes all at once. And the love song is the kind you sing when you are tired. Tired of everything around love, but not of love. In Keep Your Little Lights Alive, John-Francis Quiñonez unlocks the door for all our pains and pasts because they are ourselves, as well, and with a mind that seems to leave language sparking in its wake, sets humor and tenderness out on the table for their guests. There is something in these poems more powerful than hope. It says, if hope arrives we will have laughed and decided to live, already. "

- Sam Rush