With Tripas, Brandon Som follows up his award-winning debut with a book of poems built out of a multicultural, multigenerational childhood home, in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store. Enacting a como se dice poetics, a dialogic poem-making that inventively listens to heritage languages and transcribes family memory, Som participates in a practice of mem(oir), placing each poem's ear toward a confluence of history, labor, and languages, while also enacting a kind of "telephone" between cultures. Invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor, Som's lyricism weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities, bringing to light what is overshadowed in the reckless transit of global capitalism and imagining a world otherwise-one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the orale.

Brandon Som's The Tribute Horse unearths strange knowledge about the ways migration acts upon and is affected by a body's language, culture, perception and physical manifestations. Using found text, prose poem and Oulipian narrative, Som constructs a poetry deep in its theoretical rigor, ravishing in its sonic pleasure, and delicate in its formal constructions, drawing from various sources, including Chinese painting, Japanese photography, and narrative of immigrants through Angel Island, including that of his own grandfather.