My Poetry Corner July 2025 features the poem “Inheritance” from the debut poetry collection Yaguareté White (USA, 2024) by Paraguayan American poet Diego Báez. The collection was the finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the Berkshire Prize for Poetry.

Son of a Paraguayan father and a white, Pennsylvanian mother, Báez grew up in Central Illinois in a community devoid of families that resembled his own. His brown skin betrayed his otherness to his classmates. On family visits to Paraguay, his broken Spanish marked him as a gringo. This reminder that he wasn’t quite Paraguayan or American infuses his poetry.

Báez lives in Chicago with his wife and daughter. He teaches poetry, English composition, and first-year seminars at the City Colleges, where he is an Assistant Professor of Multidisciplinary Studies.

Rigoberto González, an American poet, writer, and book critic, notes in his Foreword to Yaguareté White: “Diego Báez [is] the first Paraguayan American poet to publish a book originally in English in the United States.” He adds that Báez is transparent in his debut poetry collection about his struggles understanding his own dual identity. “[H]e didn’t grow up speaking Spanish; and the lack of connection to a Paraguayan community in the United States excludes him from the social and cultural foundations that other South American diasporas provide for their respective immigrant populations and subsequent generations.” His memories of his Paraguayan origin arise from visits to his abuelo’s farm outside the village of Villarrica.

Nevertheless, Paraguay is ever-present throughout the poetry collection in which Báez weaves its colonial history of violent militant whiteness together with its three languages: English, the language of US imperialists; Spanish, the language of the colonizers; and Guaraní, the dialect of the indigenous peoples. In combining the Guaraní word for jaguar, yaguareté, and white in the book’s title, the poet also hints at his dual identity.

In the opening title poem “Yaguareté White,” Báez goes further in linking the indigenous peoples of the Americas. As his Paraguayan father told him when he was a kid, “I was born in America.”

No jaguars wander my father’s village, no panthers
patrol the cane fields caged in bamboo fences,

nestled among the Ybyturuzú, what passes for a mountain
range in Paraguay, the Cordillera Caaguazú. You see,

Spanish adjectives arrive after the noun they describe,
clarifying notes that add color and context.

[…]

And it’s true, no mountain lions roam my mother’s home-
town of Erie, Pennsylvania, wasted city of industry, named for the native

people who once combed it shores, called “Nation du Chat”
by the colonizing French, after the region’s Eastern Panther.

In closing, the poet explains that the jaguar has nothing to do with Guaraní mythology. Rather, Jaguars come to represent / the souls of all the dead. Inseparable from each other, // this people and their origin. So it is, and so am I, / here now in the temple.

Báez tackles the concept of whiteness in his long poem “Basic White” (pp. 72-75), defined in terms of its daily manifestations. The following excerpt are the opening six verses:

basic white is so basic right
basic white is doublespeak for supremacy
basic white enshrines individual liberty
basic white lives for private property
basic white takes what it wants when it wants it
basic white bleeds what it needs to survive

The featured poem, “Inheritance” (pp. 51-53) captured my attention. It’s not often that I come across a poem that exalts the experience of becoming a father for the first time. Moreover, it’s an immediate bond between a father and his baby girl.

While working on his poetry collection, Báez got married and later became a father. During its final publication, his daughter turned three, and then four years. In his interview with Mandana Chaffa for the Chicago Review of Books in February 2024, Báez said: “She’ll be five soon, so the life of the book represents nearly half her own, which is wild. The book closes with two poems for her. It was important for me to include poetic reminders of these moments from early parenthood that seem to last forever but are, indeed, so fleeting.”

The following excerpt, stanzas 1-3 and 7-9, addresses the poet’s need to pass on to his daughter what he has inherited from his Paraguayan father and paternal grandparents.

When my child came into this world,
she didn’t rock mine or turn it upside down
but flipped it insider out. It felt not like a burning fire,

but like a new chamber opening in my heart,
a fourth dimension unbending
between sternum and spine.

Surely it had lived there all along,
huddled with the Spanish
I hadn’t spoken in ages.

[…]

At first, simple whispers suffice:
words for “love” en Guaraní y Español.
How those early endless hours

—then days and weeks—
balloon, uninvited, to encompass the story
I tell myself of her genesis.

The way a point turns to line,
a line to surface, surface to volume,
until all that’s left is time.

In stanzas 12-20, the father imagines his daughter as a young woman, in pursuit of her own dreams, outside the quickly shrinking cage / of a father’s captive heart (stanza 16). The following excerpt are stanzas 12-14 and 17-18:

And I see her already,
moving through timelines I no longer recognize.
An anchor point or past tangent,

I’m already a bystander
in the green blaze of her ascendent arc.
She has changed so much—so much of me—already.

She fills space, and grows, and will not stop
growing, god willing. With hope, Hashem,
she’ll continue to grow

[…]

Because wasn’t it just yesterday
her breath first rounded into syllables,
sílabas into word and words into song?

Was it not just yesterday
she fit inside the makeshift cradle of my arms,
not yet so far removed from this vast world she’d cracked wide open?

The poet’s final two stanzas (21 & 22) bring us back to the present. He closes with an endearing moment that touches my heart.

Of course, all this unfolds in the time it takes to fall asleep,
to sway in the morning sun after a restless night,
her head on my shoulder, something with rhythm on the radio.

I imagine if there’s an afterlife worth living for,
it’s probably this, just like this, forever.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the work of Paraguayan American poet Diego Báez, go to my Poetry Corner July 2025.