March 2024 | Black Lawrence Press ISBN: 9781625570673 | pp. 80 [A note: The images woven among this interview

David Villaverde’s “Gnomon” is a multimodal, layered poem that began with a “two truths and one lie” conceit about the environment and ended up as a meditation on the human capacity for horror, both causing and grappling with it. The PDF below gathers some of the drafts that resulted in the final poem, published in The Adroit Journal. I spoke with Villaverde over Zoom about the function of poetry and how the personal becomes the universal. Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): The first draft of the poem is in a “two truths and a lie” format, but that conceit falls away within two drafts. Was that a prompt? How did you arrive at that initial thinking, and what wasn’t working about the form that made you move away from it? David Villaverde (DV): Oh, that’s an interesting question. I was at the Bear River Writers’ Conference with Jaswinder Bolina. And there was a prompt, maybe something vaguely environmental, and I sort of pulled that conceit out of thin air. I had read a poem by Arthur Sze called “Chrysalis.” In it, Arthur talks about how the ginkgo tree was thought to be extinct for centuries until it was rediscovered at these Tibetan or Chinese Buddhist monasteries. It’s a really bleak poem about ecological destruction, and it was presented as this moment that felt like hope that, in a symbiotic way, species can depend on each other, that caretaking for the environment can usher something like the ginkgo tree—which has been around since the dinosaurs and is really weird and incredibly beautiful—into the present day. I wanted to write about the ginkgo, but it’s impossible to write about things without accessing one’s own emotional truth. The more I read about the ginkgo, the more it became connected to everything. And that kept me returning to the page. The form wasn’t working, but what was really not working was the poem itself, and by extension my ability to listen and feel. BTR: The initial inspiration for the poem was that environmental idea, but early in your drafts, the “I” enters the poem and becomes central to the narrative. And the later drafts become increasingly confessional. Were you thinking about the balance of confession and commentary as you revised and rewrote? Do you feel like confession and commentary exist on a continuum, or is there another type of relationship between the internal and the external for you? DV: Ultimately, all I ever want to do is write about the exterior, things as they exist in the world phenomenologically. And when I try to do that, it’s not interesting, it’s boring. It’s bad, it’s really the hallmark of bad poetry: pretention. What happens is that I am forced to look inward. And in doing that, I find there’s always more and there’s always the connection between the internal world and the external. The further you go, the more you can plumb the depths of the infinite connections between all forms of life. If you go into the exterior long enough, you’re going to find yourself. And if you go into the interior long enough—well it’s this Mobius strip where you keep popping back out on the other side. But too often my writing process is dictated by my own avoidance and laziness. I don’t want to talk about the actual things that make me uncomfortable; that requires work and likely some form of growth which I’d rather avoid. I think that’s what you are getting at with “confessional.” I think this work can be framed in a confessional way because I brought those things to the surface, but I don’t think of it that way. I see that usually employed as a threadbare gesture of self-pity, like “look at me, how much I’ve suffered.” I don’t have much interest in that. What was at the heart of this poem was “look at how my suffering connects me to the suffering of others and the suffering of the world.” My problem is that I want the writing of a poem to be as painless as possible. I have to go to places that make me uncomfortable in order to produce something that I feel has any merit or that I would want to read again. And most days I just don’t want to do that. BTR: That fluctuation between the internal and external appears in your drafts, like the hint of accusation in one of these intermediate drafts. In the lines “anytime someone’s view is blocked a belt of chained teeth whir and the last of something or other becomes a pile of sawdust” and “I am not here to feel sorry for myself, to form myself into a spectacle of difference, a product to be consumed with blank stares and mute applause by the mostly [white] audience who lust after the juicy bits,” there’s a clear assignment of a perpetrator. But the final poem notably is less direct about the cause of harm. Was it your intention to remove those designations from the poem? And do you have a broader perspective on how blame and perpetrator-versus-victim dynamics exist within poetry? DV: When I wrote those things, they were very knee-jerk because I felt stuck. I needed to just say all these things that I felt. But it’s very easy to point fingers. I don’t like the certainty or the didacticism of that gesture. It’s an easy dunk to be like, “the white audience loves the consumption of this grief.” For me, it’s an obvious two-way street: wanting to say something like that, but then wanting the accolades for performing that to said audience. I don’t think that’s particularly useful. If anything, that creates a cycle of reification that upholds the truisms that one is projecting. And the truth is more complicated. I find that those moments where I was angry or frustrated don’t have much to do with the important questions of life that should be in art. They don’t fully express how I feel about the world, but rather how I felt in that one moment. BTR: The poem itself seems to argue that poetry is an insufficient abstraction of real life, that poems flatten reality or become instruments of generalization. But I found some irony in the fact that the final poem is really complex, and has a form that draws attention to itself and the lengths to which the speaker goes to clarify themself. How do you reconcile this simultaneous criticism and elevation of poetry as a medium? DV: If you ask any artist who really loves the medium they traffic in if they feel that medium is up to the task, most often what you will hear is their frustration at coming up against the limitations of oneself and of one’s tools. Every artist worth their salt has to find new ways to make their medium work for them. You always have to find new ways in which to break language in order to make meaning. There are a lot of deep-seated ironies hard coded into the poem, one of them being that poetry itself is often the handmaiden of empire, and that’s not new—the court bard’s songs of war for the king are some of the oldest examples of poetry we have in English. There’s a way in which beauty is often employed for the most barbaric things. I don’t necessarily agree with Keats that in beauty there’s some form of greater truth or absolution or salvation. And yet, like any artist, I have an obsession with what I think of as beauty and I have to address that in poetry. Life is layered often with these deep ironies that are either comedic or tragic. If there’s a god who is writing the book of my life, they would probably have a pretty good sense of humor, considering how these coincidences occur when it’s either least inconvenient or most. That’s how life happens, or at least how it feels. So, when I was writing and making this more and more complicated, I didn’t see it as incoherent or mutually exclusive. I think that most of life is structured by these grand paradoxes and I wanted something that felt true to that representation, as weird as that might look. BTR: I think it’s human nature to think that these grand coincidences must all be connected and have some greater purpose. DV: Yeah, I think part of being human is what Viktor Frankl talked about in Man’s Search for Meaning, that part of our nature is to try to make sense of the senselessness that exists around us. Growing up being sort of sensitive and in environments that are sort of violent, trying to find meaning in that and then looking at the absolute horror that exists in the world is an experience I think most of us understand firsthand. I think most people have been seeing videos of civilians being killed every day on social media for the last couple years. I was just trying write a poem about the ginkgo when I learned about the hibakujumoku, and it brought me to the horror we live in, where this nation used a nuclear bomb against a civilian population. Twice. I don’t know if anyone who feels can see any of this and reckon with what any of it means. There were shadows burned into the sidewalks. The horror embodied in that image is ineffable. There is nothing that I could ever say to make sense of it. But how can I live if I don’t try? David Joez Villaverde received an MFA from the University of Michigan where he was a Helen Zell Fellow. His poems have been published in Kenyon Review, Adroit, New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and are forthcoming in Bennington Review, Quarterly West, The Hopkins Review and Prairie Schooner. A CantoMundo Fellow, he has been recognized by The American Academy of Poets, Best New Poets, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Black Warrior Review. He lives in New York. Brittany Torres Rivera is a bilingual editor and writer. An alumna of the Fulbright Program, she is a contributing editor for Letras Latinas Blog 2. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida, she is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is the assistant editor at Graywolf Press. At Graywolf, Torres Rivera works on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles, and is especially involved in works in translation from the Spanish.

The original Letras Latinas Blog featured interviews conducted by students at University of Notre Dame The interviews were a mix of genuine scholastic curiosity and an earnest searching for answers to life's Often, these interviews were students' first public engagement with the literary world and, at times, Villamil Durán interviewed Sheryl Luna about her latest collection Magnificent Errors.

Buy: ‎ Cotopaxi Whispers by Juan Pablo Luzuriaga | Blue Light Press | August 7, 2026 | 978-1421836133 What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book? That’s tough because there are several, but my friend Juan Felipe Herrera, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, has been a huge inspiration not only as a writer but as a person. There is a quality in his writing that feels completely free. He moves between languages, cultures, sounds, images, and forms without asking permission. What are some key themes present in your book? Some of the key themes in Cotopaxi Whispers are immigration, assimilation, identity, language, family, ancestry, and belonging. The book explores what happens when we distance ourselves from parts of who we are in order to fit in, and how we find our way back. Spanish and English live together in these poems because they live together in me. Is there a connection to your past in your book? Absolutely. The past is everywhere in Cotopaxi Whispers. There’s ancestral and generational trauma, immigration, assimilation, my years being undocumented, childhood memories, family, and Ecuador. I’m also interested in the things we inherit without choosing them—the stories and silences that travel through generations. In many ways, the past in this book isn’t really past. It continues to live in our language, our families, our bodies, and our memories. Writing these poems became a way of looking back, understanding what I carry, and reclaiming parts of myself I once tried to leave behind. What was the impetus for this body of work? When life stopped during the COVID-19 outbreak, there was silence. Followed by fear, sickness, and death. During that time, it hit me: “Oh, yeah. I’m gonna die someday.” Maybe even soon, I thought, because who knows what’ll happen. So, I asked myself a question we immigrants don’t often get to ask: “What do I want to do?” We usually don’t get to answer that question because the first answer is survival—making ends meet. But in this case, I was brave enough to answer, and it was clear—I want to write. Something I’d been doing ever since I was a child, but now I wanted to do it in the open, no longer in the shadows. I want this book to serve as a blueprint for people who get lost in the assimilation process like I did. I wanted to be white, but realized my power lies in being in my own skin. For people who move to the U.S. and think that they have to purge their own culture to fit in, I want this book to say: you don't. I want the undocumented to see their language mixed with English. I want the American to see Ecuadorian culture and get used to Spanish. This book tries to bring people together and introduce a new world to those who haven't seen it. This world is sick and this is my tiny contribution toward healing. Do you have a new project that you’re working on? Could you tell us a bit about it? One of the projects I’m working on is a book that uses prose and poetry to explore Ecuadorian colloquialisms and the culture and stories behind them. Ecuadorian Spanish is full of interesting slang and idioms that carry so much history. I want people to learn about them, and I’m challenging myself to create a sort of creative dictionary—one that doesn’t simply define these expressions, but brings them to life through poetry, stories, memory, and culture. Juan Pablo Luzuriaga was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and immigrated to the United States at sixteen. He spent nearly eleven years undocumented before becoming a U.S. citizen. He studied neuroscience at Rutgers University and literature at UC Merced. Luzuriaga teaches poetry at California Men’s Colony through the William James Association and is a South Coast Writing Project fellow. Winner of the 2026 Blue Light Book Award, his work has appeared in The Acentos Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, Monterey Poetry Review, and Cholla Needles, among others. His debut collection, Cotopaxi Whispers, was published by Blue Light Press in 2026.

Buy: Wild by Grisel Y. Acosta | FlowerSong Press | July 28, 2026 | ISBN: 9781963245950 | Page Count: 122 What are some key themes present in your book? My book, Wild, explores the idea of wildness in three spheres: gender, environment, and mental health. Specifically, I wanted to look at how we attempt to “tame” women and queer folk, and what happens when we refuse such taming; how we attempt to control our environment and ab/use it in unhealthy ways and what happens if we have a more natural relationship with it; and how we attempt to classify mental health and what happens when we have a more holistic idea about mental health. These three areas clearly overlap, such how the pharmaceutical industry affects/treats women. Additionally, all my books explore the concept of outsiders. How did your relationship with your family influence your writing? I grew up in a family that was both loving and sexist, which might seem like an impossibility, but it isn’t. My parents really did love me and supported many of my goals, but they could not escape certain things they were taught. As a result, I often felt like my natural tendencies were seen as “wild” or ungodly. As I grew older and learned more, I realized this reality was much larger than my family. I explore my relationship with my mother a lot in this book, but also my relationship with my chosen sisters and the larger family of women throughout the world. Did another art form influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. Yes, there are several ekphrastic poems in the book, specifically one poem in response to Remedios Varo’s “Mujer Saljendo del Psicoanalista” and another poem in response to the photography by Mel Efrus, which was part of a workshop planned by Tamar Jacobs. As a young person, I worked a lot in visual art, so writing in response to visual art seemed so right and I’m surprised I hadn’t done this much before, choosing instead to write in response to music in my previous book. The Varo work contributed to my exploration of mental health, and the Efrus work helped me explore mental health and its relationship to the outdoors. You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book? The first line of my book (which is connected to the title of the first poem) reads “is the book my mother wanted” and the last line of my book is “a pen in your hand”. These lines make sense together in that I start with a poem that explores the book my mother wanted to write but never did, and I end with a poem that explores being (literally) a starving artist in New York City. In many ways, women’s “wildness” is due to not having agency and being the most oppressed population on the planet. My mom was educated and a working woman, but I do believe there were things that she was unable to manifest in her life because she was taught to always defer to a man. I try to address that a little bit in this book, so in some ways, the first and last line imply that she passed the pen to me. How did you get into writing? Can you pinpoint a memory where it all began for you? I was blessed to have books in my home, and I also saw books in my father’s office. Both of my parents read all the time in both English and Spanish. I mimicked my environment—this didn’t happen with my brothers, by the way. I made books before I could write full words as a child. I got as many pages as my tiny hands could hold and stapled them together and made, for example, “The Book of Ws” or “The Book of Js.” And I’d just fill the pages with letters. However, once I started reading, I started writing in earnest. My first works were plays and puppet shows, which I performed for my parents. The earliest one I can remember was a puppet show about the importance of brushing one’s teeth. If that isn’t the most Virgo thing ever…. If you could have a dinner party with anyone living or dead, who would it be and why? What would you serve for dinner? I adore cooking for my friends and having parties regularly, although I wouldn’t necessarily classify them as “dinner parties,” as I invite more people than can sit around the table, my partner DJs, and there is dancing involved. It’s more like a typical Latine party where people are eating at different times and coming in and out of the home all afternoon or evening. That said, I’d love it if these folks could attend one of my gatherings: Gregg Araki, queer filmmaker who I’ve adored since 2000; Julio Torres, actor/filmmaker/playwright who I’d put in charge of visual whimsy; Janelle Monáe, whose album, The ArchAndroid, I discovered when I was doing my PhD in Texas in 2010, and it literally helped me survive; Celia Cruz, because ¡azucar!; and Audre Lorde, not only because of her work but just to see if she’d be down to dance like fool with the rest of us. What are you currently reading? I’ve been reading more than one book at a time, because they end up informing each other. Here is the stack I’ve been working on: Literature Class by Julio Cortázar, A Philosophy of Shame by Frédéric Gros, The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (Did you know this was actually written like a satirical diary?), and Triage by Claudia Rankine. Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is a professor at the City University of New York-BCC. Her book, Wild (FlowerSong Press) was just released. Their poetry collection, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere (Get Fresh, 2021), was a 2020 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. She is the editor of Latina Outsiders (Routledge, 2019), listed by NBC Latino. Select work is in Poetry Magazine; Poem-A-Day; Acentos Review; and Hopkins Review. Key performances include the Smithsonian, the Poetry Foundation, Lincoln Center, and Joe’s Pub. Select fellowships include a 2025 New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Mid-Atlantic Arts grant and VONA Fellowship.

I said recently in another interview that I thought writing my way through all of this would heal me,

Buy: book of provocations by mónica teresa ortiz | $20 | July 2024 | 110 pages | ISBN: 978-1-7376050-6-5 Laura Villareal (LV): Your chapbook have you ever dreamed of flamingos?   was my first introduction to many of the poems in book of provocations . One of the most admirable qualities of your poetry is your thoughtful engagement with theory, philosophy, politics, and the work of other writers. I’m usually not a fan of notes sections but yours is as rich as the poems themselves. Of your writing process in the notes you wrote, “ I find myself in what Harmony Holiday calls ‘the purgatory between   recovery and relapse,’ searching for poets whose words move us to   act, to ideas that live within poems. For me, poetry is an (in)direct   action, an intersection of commitment and practice.” At what point in your writing life did this focus/ethos crystalize for you?  mónica teresa ortiz (mto): I have always been a curious person. Whenever I read anything, if I see a name, a place, another book, that is mentioned, I look it up. Rabbit holes hate to see me coming. But I want to know who the writer was reading, or what theory led them to the place they arrived. I think historical context and culture is important to being a good reader. And I am also interested in place – what was the architecture of space like for them?  For my notes section, I wrote an excerpt about that “crystallization” in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, in Spring 2021 . But I had been thinking about those ideas for a long time. Commitments in both politics and poetics are a choice by many before me. I have been blessed enough to be around people who are committed to practice and action. I was only able to articulate it more clearly, after 2020, after COVID-19 came.  LV:  On a similar note to my previous question, your work seems rooted in a line of questioning that considers what a poem can / cannot do, especially how poems live within the greater context of the world. Your poems often mention poems, asking questions like: “what does it mean // that I write // little poems // in wastelands // I call home.” I was very struck by the statement in “un/writing nature,” “ Stella says that poems will transport us to freedom / if I don’t seem that excited / it’s because I am working / to decentralize the poet / to use my words as documentation of specters”  I was reminded of a craft essay by Ana Portnoy Brimmer , where she writes “I like to think of organizing as a site to draft revolutionary poetics, and poetry as a site to revise revolutionary politics. As interlocking affairs.” Poets are always quibbling about the power of poetry in politics. How do you view the capacity of poetry? What are its limits and what are its powers?   mto:  Poetry is not directly material. We aren’t poets to make money. But I do believe poetry can be an intervention in spaces that can disrupt. There is a reason many poets have been assassinated, from Guatemala to Italy to Chile to Lebanon, and even here in the US. Refaat Alareer was assassinated by Israel. Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels was murdered by the state. Assata Shakur is still exiled. Why is language so dangerous to the state? Through the mutual aid effort, Workshops for Gaza , I have seen poets, myself included, use what we know and have access to as a material contribution to immediate needs. Workshops for Gaza offers workshops to the public, and instead of the funds going to the facilitator, the funds go directly to Palestinians facing and surviving genocide. That is one way poets can directly impact material needs. We also have to continuously speak out. Since October 7, 2023, there have been many poets who have stood with Palestine. But there are those who refuse to speak, witness, or risk anything. There are poets whose language are interventions as well. I look to Aurielle Marie, Rasha Abdulhadi, George Abraham, Solmaz Sharif, Ariana Brown, Zaina Alsous, Jacqui Germaine, Sasha Banks, Fady Joudah, Harmony Holiday, Mosab Abu Toha, Omar Sakr, some of our living poets. LV:  Oh, I really love that response because it illuminates both the power of language and action. I particularly like the description “poets whose language are interventions…” I think mentioning poems within a poem tricks the brain into snapping back into the reality so we can see what you’re documenting for what it is: intersectional struggles, genocide, climate collapse, and disaster capitalism which is all happening now. Too often new poets are told to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” but I think it’s necessary to also recognize the necessity for clarity in poems that do the work of documentation. When working with poems, how do you decide when to prioritize the explicit and when to embrace the oblique?  mto:  I want to be clear with commitments, even if perhaps sometimes that opposes tradition with poetry and with form. I prioritize an idea or intention, rather than an image. I know that’s not a popular approach, but I began writing poetry after 9/11, during the early onset of the invasion of Afghanistan. My first interactions with living poets were those who were exiled, dispossessed. I don’t know that I embrace the oblique so much as I embrace the truth of what is happening around me.  LV:  I heard recently that Layli Long Soldier won’t use metaphor anymore in active resistance to likening anything to what it's not. It feels essential for us to witness and document with the kind of clarity you use.  Texas is full of exceptional poets like yourself who illuminate our numerous ecoregions and landscapes. The poems in book of provocations  poems transport us to numerous places, but I especially love how vividly you portray the Texas Panhandle’s landscape. How does landscape inform your writing? mto: Gaston Bachelard wrote that “the poet speaks on the threshold of being” in the Poetics of Space . I grew up in a rural place alienated from cities on the threshold of prairies, which existed long before me and will long after me. I look around me and try to be in relation to the land and water around me. To ask for kinship. LV:  I resonate with that as someone who grew up in a rural area. With many of your poems, it feels like they move based on accumulation that results in revelation. The revelations don’t necessarily come at the end of the poems, but there’s a momentum to the imagery you choose to place next to each other. Your poems are so smart and layered and plentiful, so I often feel like I need to sit and think them through.  mto: Thank you. I appreciate that.  LV: You have a couple poems for the Stridentists and in the notes you say, “I’ve long been interested in the Infrarrealist movement and Stridentists, and this book provoked many ideas, including both of these poems.” I don’t think we hear enough about Mexican or Latin American artistic movements, so could you talk about them for those who might not know about them / the movement? How did you learn about them and how has their work informed yours? mto: My MFA is from the University of Texas at El Paso, and most of my classmates were Latin Americans. They were from Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Mexico. That broadened my literary landscape. They introduced me to books that informed much of my understanding of Latin American politics and history. I also lived in Barranquilla, Colombia in 2008 and in 2009, and I read a lot of Colombian writers and poets then. I began to learn that many movements circulated in Mexico, Central and Latin America. Like the surrealists – Andre Breton and Leonora Carrington – who spent time in Mexico, and the influence of the Avant Garde around the 1920s, gave rise to the Stridentist. Manuel Maples Arce was one poet I became interested in. There’s a book on the Stridentist Movement, by Elissa J. Rashkin, who quotes Maples Arce: “the artist creates his own truths and meanings” but also that “truth is subjective; meaning is unstable and depends on context.” So I found that interesting – provocative if you will… but for me, it really always returns to Bolaño and Infrarrealismo in the 1970s, which is birthed in between the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City in 1968 and the assassination of Allende in Chile in 1973. It is a complex history, but the appeal for me is the idea that poets can have commitments to ideas other than poetry. So that’s where I hope to place my work. But I am also blessed to be learning constantly from contemporary Central American artists, poets, and filmmakers that also inform my work. Liberation is not just an idea, but a word, and a practice. I think that’s what I have carried with me from these other poets.  LV:  Your book is split into 3 sections titled “terrestrial,” “celestial,” and “afterlife.” I like the idea of a book being divided into these more mythic landscapes. Could you talk a bit about the process of organizing book of provocations ?  mto: I organized the collection while I was in Mérida. During that time, poet Ariana Brown held several workshops on organizing and assembling a poetry manuscript, which was amazing. She’s a great facilitator. We read Sasha Banks’ book, america, Mine . That workshop was instrumental in the process of organizing my collection. And just being there in the Yucatan, learning about Maya history in Mexico. And of course, I have to give a lot of credit to my editors, Claire Bowman and Annar Veröld. I gave them bones and they sculpted it into a body.   mónica teresa ortiz (they / them) is a poet, memory worker, and critic born, raised, and based in Texas. Laura Villareal   is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving , (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. Her writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Sho Poetry Journal, AGNI , among others.

Buy: Hemisferio Cuir An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry | fourteen poems | March 2025 | 220 pages | ISBN: 9781738487158   Laura Villareal (LV): I’m always interested in the process of putting together an anthology because it can be so different from editor to editor. What was the process like in curating, translating, and editing Hemisferio Cuir ? Did you have prior knowledge of each contributor’s work?   Leo Boix (LB): The process was truly inspiring. It began with my efforts to compile a report on contemporary Latin American poetry for the Poetry Translation Centre (PTC) in London, which subsequently led me to translate the works of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi, who is regarded by many as the godmother of lesbian poetry in Argentina. During this endeavour, which took me many months, I recognised the pressing need for an anthology of young queer voices from Latin America, as I could not locate any anthology of this nature in English. It was through the process of researching emerging voices in the region that the concept of an anthology of young queer Latin American poets began to take shape. Several anthologies inspired me throughout this journey, including The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America by Richard Gwyn, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology , edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon- Grosman, Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color by Christopher Soto, and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry by Francisco Aragón, to name but a few. These anthologies were seminal to my research and led me to conclude the need to address this significant gap. I had begun translating some of these voices, including those of Argentine Silvia Giaganti, Colombian trans poet Flor Bárcenas Feria, and Peruvian Fiorella Terrazas. I then undertook the gradual process of contacting editors, translators, poets and colleagues both in Latin America and beyond to expand my research and compile a list of exciting new voices from the entire spectrum of the LGBTQAI+ community, including those from the trans and BIPOC communities, indigenous groups, from endangered languages, and regions outside traditional urban centres. I consulted online zines, anthologies, poetry magazines, and books, and received numerous recommendations from poets and colleagues in both the UK and Latin America. The list of poets grew, and with it, the links connecting each poem and poet built into a map of literary voices that was exciting and thought-provoking. I proposed the initial project to fourteen poems, a London-based poetry publisher, spotlighting the most exciting LGBTQ+ poets in anthologies and pamphlets. They promptly accepted my proposal, marking the moment when the seminal idea transformed into a tangible anthology.     LV: As far as the translation of each poet’s work, how closely did you work with the poets? I know some poet-translator teams go back and forth a lot and some don’t at all.   LB: That’s such a fascinating question. I've had the wonderful opportunity to work closely with poets who are also translators, like the talented Argentinean Paula Galíndez. We delved into translation from various viewpoints, discussing specific words and terms from both Argentine and UK perspectives. In some instances, I was given the creative freedom to make decisions, either because the poet didn’t speak English or they kindly allowed me to take the lead. One memorable project involved a poem by Argentine Washington Atencio, which we beautifully translated together during a Poetry Translation Centre workshop I led at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2024, with the invaluable assistance of the brilliant translator John Herring. I also had the joy of including poems by the Puerto Rican poet Myr Olivares, translated through the close collaboration of celebrated poet and translator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera. I approached each poem with a personal touch, sometimes paying extra attention to pronouns, complex ideas and wordplay in Spanish, and at other times tackling the challenge of translating a sonnet, like with Salvadoran poet Alberto López Serrano, while carefully preserving the rhyming schemes and internal rhythm in my English translations. Each poem was unique, deserving of special care and attention, and I truly cherished the challenge of bringing them into English, despite it not being my first language. Writing poetry in both Spanish and English is a journey I deeply enjoy, and one that informs my work as a translator.   LV: I felt very moved by many of the poems especially “[Post]humous Poem” by Alejandra Rosa Morales, “Enunciation Displacement” by Pablo Romero, and “But if I’m honest” by Paula Galíndez. You very generously, but succinctly, encapsulate the strengths of all the anthology poets in your introduction. Each poet has such a distinct voice and approach to poetics. As you were translating, did you encounter any challenges or revelations?   LB: What a lovely selection! Each poem in the anthology presented its own unique, distinctive challenge during translation, whether in form, concept, syntax or music. Yet, they also offered me an exciting chance to discover a specific topic or a personal and collective truth, which inspired me as a poet and a translator. From the very beginning of this book project, my goal was to include as many poems and poets with distinctive voices as possible, showcasing works that explore a wide array of themes relevant to today’s Latin America, particularly in the context of the rising anti-trans and anti-LGBTQAI+ rights all over the world that were hard-fought. These themes and preoccupations ranged from family relationships and queer identities to issues of discrimination and trans experiences, while also exploring all forms of love, loss, and sexual desire in the context of a post-patriarchal society.   LV: You’ve been a wonderful advocate for Latinx writers over the years. Letras Latinas collaborated with you on Season 2 of Curated Conversation(s): A Latinx Poetry Show to showcase UK poets and put them in conversation with US based poets. I think you’re uniquely positioned to answer a few questions. The first being: what areas of global Latinx literature need tending to? Where can people pitch in to help make the work accessible in their respective countries? And second, since this anthology is the first of its kind in much of the English-speaking world, what are your personal hopes and aspirations for this anthology? LB: So many vibrant areas of global Latinx literature truly deserve our attention and support. We still need to shine a spotlight on BIPOC Latinx writers, as well as those who are using endangered languages, and those who are disabled or neurodivergent, which sadly have been marginalised for too long. Let's also uplift the voices of Latinx and Latin American writers from communities who are facing increasing attacks, including trans, migrant, and refugee writers. We should also celebrate the creativity of polylingual Latinx writers who courageously push the boundaries of literary genres and explore other art forms in their work. While we have a lot of progress to make and the current challenges are many, projects like Hemisferio Cuir are taking us in the right direction. I hope this anthology reaches as many audiences as possible, shining a light on the incredible work of the poets featured in Hemisferio Cuir —many of whom have never had their voices translated into English before. My goal is to inspire others, both in our community and beyond, to continue their fight for expression and equality. The response from audiences in the UK has been incredible, and we are already planning launches in Los Angeles, England, and Latin America.   Watch contributors from Hemisferio Cuir read their poems Note: Pablo Jofre's video was directed by Sailin Carbonell and Leonardo Blanco Photo Credit: Naomi Woods Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet born in Argentina who lives and works in London and Deal, Kent, UK. His debut English collection Ballad of a Happy Immigrant  (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. It was selected as one of the best five books of poetry by The Guardian (August 2021). Boix second English collection, Southernmost: Sonnets ,  is forthcoming with Chatto & Windus (Penguin Random House) in June 2025. He has also authored two poetry collections in Spanish, Un Lugar Propio  (2015) and Mar de Noche  (2017), with Letras del Sur Editora, Argentina. He is the main editor and translator of Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry (fourteen poems, 2025). Boix has also translated many Latin American poets into English, including Diana Bellessi, José Watanabe, Liliana Ancalao, Cecilia Vicuña, Oscar David López and Jorge Eduardo Eielson. He has been included in many anthologies, such as the Forward book of poetry, Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2020 (BlackSpring Press), Islands Are But Mountains: Contemporary Poetry from Great Britain (Platypus Press), 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren Books), Why I Write Poetry (Nine Arches Press), 100 Queer Poems (Vintage/Penguin), Até Mais/Until More: An Anthology of Latinx Futurisms, (Deep Vellum), Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye), Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets (Bloodaxe), among others. His poems have appeared in many national and international journals, including POETRY, PN Review, The Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Poetry London. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works program, co-director of Un Nuevo Sol, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture new voices of Latinx writers in the UK, an advisory board member of the Poetry Translation Centre and a board member of Magma Poetry. He has written poems commissioned by Royal Kew Gardens, the National Poetry Library, Tate Modern, Whitstable Biennale, Bradford Literary Festival, Estuary Festival, Un Nuevo Sol, La Linea Festival and the Kent Mining Museum in England. He received the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize Award, the Keats-Shelley Prize, a PEN Award, and The Society of Authors’ Foundation and K. Blundell Trust. Order a copy of Leo's forthcoming book Southernmost: Sonnets (Penguin Random House) Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving  (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). She earned her MFA at Rutgers University—Newark and has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Program, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at University of Texas-Austin. Her writing has appeared in Guernica , Poetry Magazine , AGNI , The American Poetry Review , and elsewhere.

TRP: The University Press of SHSU) | September 1, 2024 Note: Frontextos are woven throughout the interview

Buy: Fabulosa ISBN:9781956907094 | $18 | JackLeg Press | pp. 76 | Publication Date: June 10, 2024 What are some key themes present in your book? Fabulosa includes memory, poetry itself (there are several ars poetica poems), love for beauty and art, and the remaking of a self, among others, but I hope readers will mine their own themes. Can you talk about your use of form and theory? The forms in Fabulosa include tercets, couplets, the prose poem, and one monostitch, among others. It’s a conscious decision to include a variety in my work. But that has less to do with form, per se, than it has to do with the visual aspects of making a book. I like being able to page through a book and sense the differences in how each poem was made. Perhaps that’s a naive restlessness on my part. Even eye candy. But part of this, too, is being drawn toward poems that seem to have an organic, inevitable quality to them: they were hewn in this manner because they had to be. More broadly, the book divides into three sections: “Noir & Glitz,” “Wolf Behind the Saint,” and “In the Director’s Cut.” Those section titles derive from phrases contained in the book’s opening poem, which is a blueprint. That opening poem also includes the first mention of gloves, which become a recurrent motif, and it also introduces elements of crime and glamour that reappear later, too. Even the notion of a “plot” comes around again, in a poem titled “On the Failures of Plot.” Writing Fabulosa taught me something about theme and variation. I learned how to write this book in the course of writing it. You could say that the form (of a book) is both made, and revealed. I also learned that I was wrong: I used to think that content determines the form, but in this case, because I kept returning to that opening poem in various ways, I’ve found that now and then, setting the form will generate the content, it can in fact go in more than one direction. Poetry is vast enough for contradiction, revision, and exception. Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers? Is there anything you wish you knew? Read widely. And don’t think of inspiration as a lightning strike. The material that finds its way into a poem is often subconscious. You may be gathering ideas without realizing it, or thinking for many years in silence, or observing details that will only resurface much later, even when it looks like you aren’t writing. People can teach you technique. But no one can teach you perception and instinct. Those are both more bodily, I think, and they refine with time. If I had any advice for my past self, it would be to write with greater abandon. I wish I had known sooner what it looks and feels like to go for broke. What’s your favorite line(s) from your book? “I wanted to write, but none of the words / meant saudade” makes me think about the perpetual search for language and the inadequacy of words, even poetry, to express memory, longing, and experience. We are haunted by much, and poetry haunts us, in turn. Is there a connection to your past in your book? Yes. A few poems revisit late adolescence. A few are set in Panama and Pittsburgh, where I once lived. More widely, a few poems include aspects of the past that I’ve never lived. Whether it happens through a glancing, lighter mention (of Gloria Swanson, for instance), or a reference to history (the Doomsday clock), these poems gesture toward knowing that the past is never as distant as it seems. How did writing this book transform you? Every book makes its own demands and creates an atmosphere. In the moment when I am writing an individual poem, I don’t necessarily know what the larger landscape is even going to be about. I do know that I can trust that the act of writing one poem will lead me into finding the next. Fabulosa reaffirms this for me. It’s like walking through a series of doors. And the longer I write, the more I can live with uncertainty about understanding the “how” or “when” surrounding all of this. As far as transformation goes: it would take the next book to show what’s changed. Did another artform influence this work? Painting, music, dancing, etc. While writing Fabulosa, I listened to the Ludovico Einaudi album In a Time Lapse. The book includes, too, poems inspired by Bruegel, Bosch, Tamara de Lempicka, Olympic figure skating programs, Dior’s Bar suit, and TV dramas. In many ways, this book is a museum of influences. Art is often in conversation with other art, and my poems reveal their sources. I would not have become a poet without other books, and all of the arts. Born in the Republic of Panama, Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012), which won the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024). A National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, she freelances in Arizona. www.karenrigby.com

November 16, 2020: " Pockets " featured on Poets.Org We see point A and point B, but I had an email interview Interview Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): “Gangs crossing each other out” appears much earlier on in

Malinalli by Veronica Chapa | Atria/Primero Sueno Press | March 2025 | ISBN: 978-1668009017 [Note: This interview