Kyle Carrero Lopez Names Five Books That Inspired His Debut Poetry Collection

Kyle Carrero Lopez's debut poetry collection, Party Line, explores Cuban–American relations, Black identity across borders, and queer nightlife. In one poem, he critiques the exclusivity of queer parties that charge admission fees while claiming to be utopian spaces. Carrero Lopez cites five books that inspired his work: Ai Ogawa's Cruelty, which influenced his poem 'Cuba, 2022' as a sequel to Ogawa's 'Cuba, 1962'; Lucille Clifton's Collected Poems, whose epigraph in 'listen children' shaped his poem 'Chalkboard'; Philip Larkin's The Complete Poems, referenced in his lyric essay 'Public Policy'; E. Hughes's Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, which led to his poem 'Anarchic Ode'; and Assata Shakur's Assata: An Autobiography, which inspired the final poem imagining an encounter with Shakur at a farmer's market in Havana. Carrero Lopez, a New Jersey native, notes Shakur's escape from a New Jersey prison as a driving element. The list was shared as part of Vogue's Required Reading series.