Meadowlark Press releases Protest as Love Poem by Huascar Medina
We are honored to announce the release of Protest as Love Poem, Huascar Medina’s third poetry
collection and a finalist of the 2025 Meadowlark Press Birdy Poetry Prize!
Book Launch Details:
7:00-8:30
p.m., May 22, 2026
ArtsConnect
Topeka
909
N Kansas Ave.
Topeka,
KS 66608
Book Description:
A finalist for the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize, Huascar Medina’s highly anticipated third book of poetry, Protest as Love Poem, is a four-part expression of love through defiant truths and collective survival. An urgent rebuttal to apathy, Protest as Love Poem is a plea for intimate authority and a call for a revolution. It is both political and personal, endearing and indignant—a direct request to feel more, not less, in this present moment.
About the Author:
Huascar Medina is a father, poet, and editor living artfully in Topeka, Kansas. He’s the author of three books of poetry, How to Hang the Moon (Spartan Press, 2017), Un Mango Grows in Kansas (Spartan Press, 2020), and Protest as Love Poem (Meadowlark Press, 2026). He served as Poet Laureate of Kansas from 2019-2022. His work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, Gasconade Review, Green Mountains Review, KANSAS! Magazine, Latino Book Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
What Readers Are Saying:
In Protest as Love Poem, Huascar Medina breaks us with his lines. Sometimes short and urgent, warning us, “The red hats / are coming.” Other times, long and flowing as if in prayer . . . a haunting invocation longing for mother tongue to offer us “a place of refuge and safety.” These poems, however, are anything but safe. They are a punch to the gut. There is a discomfort in these poems. An uneasiness like one might feel living in a place that goes out of its way to make a Brown man feel like an immigrant in his own land. Devastatingly acute erasures share space with palliative prayers in Protest as Love Poem. After reading it, I found myself trying to think of one word that could best capture how I feel about this book . . . necessary. These poems are necessary, needed, essential, maybe now more than ever. These poems need no tulips to walk through. Huascar tells us as only a poet can, honestly and openly to our faces, “Right now, Brown people are disappearing, / in broad daylight, in America.” In Protest as Love Poem, Huascar exposes himself to us in an aching way, “speaking in a way / only a wound could heal.” People need to read these poems. Profs need to teach these poems. I don’t curse lightly, but damn . . . these poems must be spread far and wide.
—Joaquín Zihuatanejo, author of Occupy Whiteness and IMMIGRANT
In an era of ubiquitous anti-Latinx scapegoating, surveillance, and ridicule, Medina’s poems serve as brave protest poems, vulnerable truth-telling documents, and affirmations of empowerment and force. The stripped-down, accessible language effectively pulls the reader into a powerful narrative of resilience and survival, a candid account of a Latino in middle America. A must-read collection of fortitude and charm.
—Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Bad Mexican, Bad American
Huascar Medina’s third book of poetry, Protest as Love Poem, beats the drum of revolution with tender power and calls us to action with his earnest interrogation of the multifaceted human experience. With one foot in the Heartland and the other rooted in his Motherland, Huascar weaves a passionate immigrant citizen song heavy with the body politic and a molotov mother tongue— “rooted in rebellion; / harvesting more than survival . . . / a higher yield of Joaquins, Huertas, and Guevaras.” Medina summons the celestial and stars to the frontline of this love song for his people. “On Earth, / humans don’t treat us / human enough—call us / aliens. To cope, I became celestial, brilliant- / bodied, full of gravity, pulled down, heavier— / wishing to warp time and safer spaces.” Within these pages, there is still safe space, a reprieve from the apathy and disillusion turned toward spiritual striving and finding what we all search for: Libertad and Love.
—Kai Coggin, Hot Springs Poet Laureate and author of Mother of Other Kingdoms
