Author Spotlight: Juania Sueños

Buy topography of a border / line bird | Mouthfeel Press | September 15, 2025 | ISBN: 978-1-957840-43-7 | Pages: 69

What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?

Anne Carson! I first read Autobiography of Red while working on my thesis, and its surreal, hypnotizing structure was astonishing, but what amazed me even more was how she still managed to make readers fall in love with the novel’s hero Geryon. I wanted to write something similar, only à la Gloria Anzaldua’s “auto-historia” centering my mother as the Epic Hero. The second part of the book “Heaven” recounts the story of a fictional character based on my mom, and like in mythology, there is an odyssey: traversing to the U.S., which brings forced transformation, figurative (an identity shift) and literal (from woman-wolves into dogs) and being exiled to an underworld, which in this case, is the Doghouse, or a stand-in for the U.S. but could represent any western empire.

William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why? 

Peaches! My grandfather had a peach orchard, and I have so many memories of eating duraznos en almibar, peaches in syrup that my grandmother made, so there are several mentions of peaches in my writing. Plant: Yerbaniz, of course! It’s a type of marigold plant that my grandparents used to pick from the sides of the road--during the fall, it was everywhere! The cyanotype that became the book cover was made by sprinkling real leaves of my family’s Yerbaniz I’d saved for years--it showed up as speckles around the bottom edge of the book. Celestial body: Venus, the morning star. My tía’s name is Lucero, it translates as “morning star” which was my favorite thing to search for as a kid every twilight, and every morning! It was always the first visible sparkly marble in the sky. 

What was your writing process? Your editing process? Did you adopt a unique process for this book, or do you have a “go-to” approach for all your writing?

topography of a border /line bird is a version of my M.F.A. thesis--which began as a novel, then a memoir through which I wanted to tell the story of a young girl who struggled with understanding her identity, or rather, who had a concept of herself blurred by systems and borders, and a traumatized young mother. Though, I quickly realized this was larger than my story. My story was my mother’s story, my story was my grandmother’s story, my story was my family’s story--I could see this ball of yarn, entangled with history and time, and as I pulled a thread there was no straight line. It was full of knots, getting stuck in trauma, in abuse, in grief, and in these structures, these empires, which had all taken over my brain. My straight-forward prosaic narrative began breaking down, and it was in this deconstruction, this permission for chaos that the book started to breathe on its own. I started writing when I could, when I had these spurts of images and emotions, and then I just let it go. I let my brain battle it out on the page. My memory failed me. History failed me. One of the main coping mechanisms we’re taught is to forgive and forget. Forgive transgressions and transgressors--a lot of the time for colonized people, for abused people, that’s survival. So there were so many gaps, so many things I’d forgotten. I allowed myself to approach the story differently, unbound by constraints of structure and craft. I connected with my body and used what I had at my disposal. Letters from my mother, photographs, fragmented visions of my childhood, pieces of dreams. A lot of stream of consciousness. I hope that whoever reads this can start their own incantation to their ancestors, to their story, whatever that looks like, however they can, and know the only bounds here are the ones tethering us to our loved ones. My brain is broken, it forgets, it repeats itself. That’s fine! Let me embrace it! Let me love it! 

What are some key themes present in your book? 

Blood, family, land, mental illness, violence, survival, queer love, postcolonial theory.

Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc.

Definitely Jenny Holzer’s installation piece “Kind of Blue” which I visit often at the Modern Art museum in Fort Worth--where I grew up. It reminds me of Clarice Lispector’s work, it puts you in this dreamscape that seems nonsensical at first, but soon unfolds truths you can’t unshake for days afterward. The other main art pieces were actually two Mexica codices from Bernardino Sahagún’s Florentine Codex. In “I’m Suckered Into Paying JSTOR Forty Bucks for Faggots & Soddomites Lesbians & Hermaphrodites” I reference the codices, and include my cyanotype version of them, which I modified by double-reverse exposuring the images--making it look like there are two faces/shadows to each figure. One is of a “Patlache” which has multiple Nahuatl interpretations, like change, a wide thing, or wild cacao, but what Sahagún called “a detestable woman…who does it with another woman” among other pejorative names listed in the poem. The other is of a “Xochihua” in Nahuatl means “flower bearer” but it was translated as “a puto priest” by the colonial document, and was altered by the clergy who added flames beneath the Xochihua man to imply a menacing and negative context. Encountering this was such a revelation of how truly one-sided and distorted our ancestral history is! 

---

Juania Sueños is a queer Chicanx writer, educator, translator, mother, & community advocate. She co-founded and is an editor at Infrarrealista Review. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, New York Quarterly, Sybil Journal, The Skink Beat Review, Porter House Review, Nat. Brut, and the Westchester Review. She is a migratory bird from Zacatecas. She has collaborated with Texas After Violence Project on various projects since 2021. On her desk sit many peculiar, sidewalk-found objects, an MFA diploma in Creative Writing from Texas State. She's the author of the hybrid poetry collection topography of a border / line bird  (Mouthfeel Press, 2025).