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The Rendering by Anthony Cody | June 2023 | Omnidawn | ISBN: 9781632431141 In an interview with The Guardian

I used to run a series of interviews called Writers Talking About Anything but Writing, because I love The third thing I’ll say is that as a Taurus (yes I will be mentioning astrology in this interview more If for the sake of those reading this interview, I had to reduce it down to its core then perhaps I’d

Thanks so much for taking time to read my work and complete this interview. I had the incredible pleasure of interviewing Myriam Gurba recently for my school and a student asked

For our next 20th Anniversary event , Letras Latinas is headed to San Antonio, Texas. Letras Latinas collaborated with the legendary Macondo Writers Workshop to bring Michelle Otero for a public reading as part of the Guest Faculty writers at Trinity University in the Ruth Taylor Recital Hall on July 27, 2024 at 7:00- 8:15 pm. Otero is also providing a free community workshop called How to eat a Memory at Gemini Ink on July 25, 2024 at 10 am-12 pm. See Macondo's website for more details. For many years, the Macondo Writers Workshop has a haven for writers. On Macondo's website, writers Pat Alderete, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Larson, Olivia Mena, Amelia ML Montes, and Carla Trujillo describe Macondo as a place named "after the mythical village in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . During the week, the participants would leave the time and place of their ordinary lives. Macondo was and has always been a soul family. Writers from across the country felt at home in the sweltering heat of South Texas. During the day they would hone their craft and their stories in the Macondo Writers Workshop, 'to inspire and challenge one another in order to incite change in our respective communities' through each other’s writing." We spoke to Macondista, Michelle Otero, about her recent book Vessels: A Memoir of Borders (FlowerSong Press), her previous chapbook Malinche's Daughter (Momotombo Press), and what she's looking forward to this summer at Macondo Writers Workshop. Brent Ameneyro (BA): A story being told out of chronological order can strengthen the arrival of certain moments of tension. It is also a way to mirror the way memory often works: fragmented, a little chaotic. In addition to writing Vessels  in this way, you also chose to jump back in time to before you were born, to your ancestors’ stories. Time becomes fluid as the reader bounces around in what feels like an eternal story, one that started long ago and is still being written off the page. Can you speak on the impetus behind the way you approached time and storytelling? Michelle Otero (MO): Trauma has a way of compressing time, of making certain events feel present, even if they happened years or decades or centuries ago. This was certainly true for my grandfather. After decades of relative good health, my grandma’s illness and death triggered his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and reminded all of us, in the words of his psychiatrist, that “every day is an anniversary for Mr. Moran.”  I also wanted to convey the sense of history walking in circles, patterns repeating themselves, inheritance, how each generation does some of the work the previous generations did not complete, how we keep revisiting old wounds until we make a conscious effort to heal them.  Writing this book is one of the ways I hoped to lighten the load for future generations.  Laura Villareal (LV): Vessels: A Memoir of Borders  includes essays from your chapbook Malinche’s Daughter  published in 2006 by Momotombo Press. I really admire the hybrid form you chose for Vessels . I think we often think of genres as being very separate, but Vessels  is a masterpiece of hybridity. It resists our expectations of how a memoir should look by intertwining poems and fictions. When you wrote those first essays in Malinche’s Daughter , did you already know the essays would be contained in a hybrid book like Vessels ? Did you ever have any hesitations about writing a memoir in this way? Were there any books that influenced your writing of this book? MO: Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed A Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A Harrison, Candelaria, Fletcher Nance Van Winckel’s workshop on hybrid forms  Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and The House on Mango Street When I wrote Malinche’s Daughter , I was still in my MFA program at Vermont College, and though I was focused on creative nonfiction, I appreciated being in community with poets. (A trusted friend advised me to spend as much time reading and listening to poetry as possible. Write poetry. Read poetry. It will make your prose better.) My grandma’s voice required this hybrid form. The short pieces I call The Grandma Poems started off as overburdened, not-so-lyric essays in which I was trying to put the reader in my grandma’s kitchen or hospital room. It just didn’t work. And then I re-read Woman Hollering Creek  by Sandra Cisneros and remembered how much I loved her short poems with long titles, how the title both rooted and launched the poems. So I went back to my ladened grandma pieces and stripped away everything but her voice. In the end, both on and off the page, it was my grandma’s voice that could make or break anyone in our family.  I remember Denise Chávez starting an Acknowledgments page with “Who says I can’t have 3 pages of Acknowledgments?” So, who says I can’t write a hybrid memoir? I started the book in lyric essays, but the more time I spent with it, the more my grandma and Malinche and Coyolxauhqui asked to be written as poetry. BA: Mythology and history make their way into the book. Did you do research or did you pull this all from prior knowledge and memory? What was your writing process? MO: Yes and yes. Research, memory, dreams, prior knowledge, serendipity.  I don’t know when I first heard the name Malinche, but even that first encounter had echoes of Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman.  Cortés’s wily interpreter. She was a teenager. She was given to the Spaniards.  I kept trying to go back to a time when women were safe.  The curanderismo course at the University of New Mexico.  Traditional Mexican healers.  Some of these practices seeped into me through ceremony. My own healing journey.  BA: I like the way characters are given nicknames, it reminds me of the way one might tell a story to a friend: Bad Boyfriend, Physician Assistant cousin. Aside from avoiding potential grievances from including real names, it feels like there was also a creative aspect to this decision, creating a universality to these characters. Was this intentional?  MO : For Bad Boyfriend, especially, I wanted to create the feel of an archetype, rather than a traditional character. In early drafts, I felt I was writing the case against a particular partner. See, everyone? See how bad this person was to me? That didn’t serve the narrative or me. Then I tried to make the reader fall in love with this person, just as I had fallen in love in real life. When things finally clicked was when I realized that what mattered was not him or how bad that particular relationship was, but Michelle’s pattern of choosing men who were unavailable.  I also wanted to give the sense that there are so many things over which we have no control. My grandmother’s illness and death hit us suddenly, and as it was happening, the doctors and nurses—even the attendant controlling access to the critical care unit—didn’t feel like human beings with whom we might relate, or who might offer us comfort, but forces delivering life, death, good news, bad news, comfort, distress. For so long, this was also how I felt about romantic love, like relationships were something that happened to me and the object of my affection had the power to accept or reject me.  LV: In the Acknowledgements you write, “One good thing about working on a manuscript for eighteen years is all the helpers who show up along the way.” As much as the myth of the solitary writer persists in popular media, I always appreciate hearing about all the writers who championed and shepherded books into the world. I was moved by the scenes within the memoir where Stephanie and Karen helped you get back home to Las Cruces when you were overwhelmed and grief-struck. It illustrated such radical care from your fellow writers and friends. We should all be so lucky to have fellow writers like that in our lives. How much of the book is shaped by your relationships with other writers? MO: Even the mythical solitary writers had someone to cook and clean for them. I don’t imagine these were healthy relationships for the partners doing the cooking and cleaning.  I wanted a low-residency program because I wanted to stay in my community while I was practicing my craft.  This book wouldn’t exist without my community.  LV: You will be attending the Macondo Writers Workshop as a featured writer this summer. Summer workshops like these are such essential gathering places for writers that often result in lifelong friendships and pivotal spaces that help launch projects in new directions. As a Macondista, has this workshop influenced or guided your work in any ways? Outside of Macondo itself, is there anything you’re looking forward to about spending time in San Antonio? MO: My first Macondo in the summer of 2006 was like an MFA program in one week. I had just returned to the US from Oaxaca. Malinche’s Daughter  had come out a few months before and caused a rift in my family. I came back to the US feeling homeless and untethered. Here I had done this brave thing, and it caused me to lose people I love. I felt like San Sebastián, shot full of arrows, but still alive. What’s the point of speaking the truth if everyone is going to drop you? I cried through Sandra’s critique of my work.  Migas and café con leche at Cascabel. Anything from Vegan Avenue. Michelle Otero is the author of  Vessels: A Memoir of Borders ,  Bosque: Poems , and the essay collection  Malinche's Daughter . She served as Albuquerque Poet Laureate from 2018-2020 and co-edited the  New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023  and  22 Poems & a Prayer for El Paso,  a tribute to victims of the 2019 El Paso shooting. She is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Brent Ameneyro is the author of the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023) and the collection A Face Out of Clay  (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2024). He is the 2022–2023 Letras Latinas Poetry Coalition Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor at The Los Angeles Review . 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.

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

You hold several editorial roles such as: Interviews Editor at EcoTheo Review , Senior Book Reviews Editor You’re also a consistent book critic and interviewer. In my editorial roles, that is obviously through reading poems, conducting/sharing interviews, and featuring He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review , senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly ,

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: 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.

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

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