BACHELOR

OCTOBER 2025

Flower Song Press

Gustavo Hernandez writes from the slippery threshold between the living and the dead, from “The last table before the dance floor.” These poems inhabit places-that-are, and then transfigure into places-that-once-were, like the Cienega, a swampland once inhabited by singing tree frogs, land tamed by “the hands and blades and bricks of ghosts,” and Jalisco, the mother/fatherland, where his morning run here, in Santa Ana, is also a “race from our plaza to the western borders of Tototlan.” Indeed, the poems’ speaker moves like a ghost, from affiliation to singularity and back again, from son, brother, uncle, lover, to a state of profound bachelorhood, a traveler moving through a house of mirrors who encounters and re-encounters himself. These are poems that Hernandez choreographs around a seed of stillness and silence, poems with the elegance of Meche Barba in a black and white film, who “dances under a white perfumy pseudonym.” Theirs is the syntax of the dead. Theirs is the understanding that nothing is just one thing; they “reject reduction” at every turn. Maybe that is why so many poems in this collection share the same title— “Bachelor,” “Husband,” “Nocturne,” “Son,” “I Can’t Settle on One Figure for a Sunset,” “Conclusion,” from mirror to mirror, an archetype turned in the hand like a cut diamond, each poem, a facet. In Bachelor, Hernandez has written a book like no other, inhabited by poems of the soul.

Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

Gustavo Hernandez, it would be my honor if you would school me on how to write the modern love poem. BACHELOR is a once-in-a-lifetime book that transcends the sensations of physical touch, deep-eyed stares, and late-night whispers from the greatest lovers. Somewhere the moon is tucked away watching. Somewhere I am licking an orange rind as the California sun rises, and I am reminded of the power I hold over a past lover. This is the power Hernandez’s speaker bestows on his readers. It is the gift of wisdom—of having lived and living every moment through the sensory and synesthetic—through the sensational and sensual—through the impossible and divine. Again. Man. Son. Lover. Uncle. Boyfriend. Volta. Hunk. Sunset. Again. Hernandez’s work is the scent association of musk and vanilla dancing in nostalgia as his speakers reach the ineffable realm of longing. Oh, Gustavo Hernandez, thank you for teaching us longing. Thank you for teaching us passion. Take us into the nocturne. After all, aren’t all the greatest people on Earth, bachelors?

                                                          Dorothy Chan, author of Babe and Return of the Chinese Femme

“This myth, like everything/ else in the realm of love,” Gustavo Hernandez writes in Bachelor, “can be stripped down to the vulnerable.” Hernandez’s poetry superpowers are lyric vulnerability and the ability to strip a narrative down to its essences. In his poetic lexicon, bachelorhood is not a descriptor as much as it is a mindset, an ability to name the world’s loneliness, then keep it company. The lines between bachelor and husband, between living and dead, between family and neighbor, “can be blurred” and, “if necessary, expanded.” Bachelor will seduce you: “lonely doesn’t have to mean lonely anymore.”

James Allen Hall, author of Romantic Comedy

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