Andrés Cerpa is the author of two books of poetry,  Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019) and The Vault (2021), which was longlisted for a National Book Award and celebrated as one of the best poetry books of 2021 by The New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, + elsewhere. 

“In The Vault, his striking sophomore poetry collection, Andrés Cerpa is our Virgil, offering us a path through the dark realm of loss with fragments of unsent letters, indelible imagery, and exquisite language. … Cerpa has traveled a long way to return with this collection, and through his skillful writing, his unanswered missives offer their own reply.”
—Mandana Chaffa, Ploughshares

“A locked box of explosive pain exists within the speaker of Andrés Cerpa’s second collection The Vault, but the explosion never comes. Instead, the two thirty-five-plus page poem sequences, written in spare, double-spaced stanzas, read like leaks, secrets and confessions slipping out from under pressure. … Cerpa speaks to the lonely desolation in all of us.”
—Emily Pérez, RHINO

“…the honesty depicted on every page highlights Cerpa’s ability to channel grief into a more welcoming reality. Cerpa’s voice is one to follow, and if his future work is anything like the two books he has under his belt, we, as readers and students of a world that isn’t always ideal to our hearts, will no doubt feel compelled to learn from the ways in which Cerpa takes everyday tragedies and molds them into opportunities for empathy and growth.”
—Esteban Rodríguez, Adroit Journal

“Fresh off his sparkling debut, Bicycle in a Ransacked City, Andres Cerpa's sophomore collection cements his status as one of the canon's most astute conjurers of lyric and line. Threaded through with ache and hard-won revelation, The Vault sustains and energizes themes from the poet's previous work. But here merciless self-reflections sport a bladed edge—here are the intrepid musings of a man who has reckoned with grief and wrestled with the specter of longing. Muscular and melodic, these extraordinary poems establish Cerpa as a voice that's impossible to turn away from.”
—Patricia Smith

“In his brilliant second book, Andrés Cerpa moves through the labyrinth of grief. Line by line, the hurt begins to cast several shadows: the slow walk toward heartache, addiction, the death of a father. His language, like anguish, is bewildering, profound. Grief also triggers an astonishing self-awareness—a reckoning, the ‘desperate / Hopper-esque light.’ Nonlinear but unbroken, bristling with jaw-dropping imagery, The Vault is an impeccably crafted book. It moved me as a reader. It taught me a few things as a poet.”
—Eduardo C. Corral

“These are spare sequences, notational and nicked by grief, though they lash out in lyric unrest and sudden splendor. If I could lead you on a treasure hunt through The Vault, you’d find the porcelain shard, wolf skin, a set of calendar dates, the sound of silk and razor blades, and all the afters. There is something of an after feeling here, as though we were standing in the riled wake of catastrophe that lumbered past moments ago.”
—Carolina Ebeid