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Brava by Violeta Garza | $15 | First Matter Press | 53 pages | 2025 | ISBN-13: 978-1-958600-11-5 (paperback) I had the pleasure of chatting with Violeta Garza on December 8th, 2025, to talk about her debut poetry chapbook, Brava . The following is a transcription of our conversation. Cloud Cardona (CC):  I’d like to start with the journey to Brava . What was your journey-making process? How did you know this was going to be a collection? What called you into writing Brava  at this particular moment? Violeta Garza (VG):  I wanted poems I could age into. I wanted poetry that could stimulate my throat chakra, which is something that I struggle with sometimes. You know, I was rewarded for not speaking up when I was growing up. So,I wanted something that felt very truthful, something of the ages, of the ancestors, lineage of who has come before and who is here now and who is going to come in the future. When I think of what Brava became—not that I set out to do this, but after the fact when I saw what she became—I realized that I never grew up. It’s funny that I’m telling you this because you have your poem “Tía-Shaped,” but I never really had the tía that would take me in and take care of me in that way. I know that some people talk about their books being their children, but for me,  Brava  is my tía. La tía Brava . She likes to take her clothes off, and she’s the one who is healing those generational patterns by speaking her truth. There are times that I want to be more Brava  than I really am. She’s become the role model for what I can’t say out loud, but she says it for me. I feel her taking me by the hand and saying,  c’mon, get out of your shell . I am just really grateful for her showing me the way. CC:   Brava  is your tía! I love that. I wanted to ask you about your public readings. We first met at a reading for Voices de la Luna . You were coming into the poetry scene here in San Antonio and doing a lot of readings. I feel like very quickly, even maybe the first time I saw you read, you already had a stage presence. Could you talk about your performance style, what helped you along the way, and any tips for people looking to break through on stage? VG:  Yes! There were three things that got me here—one, I got to teach English to high school students in Japan who didn’t speak English, so I learned to use my voice and body in a way that was more, maybe, dramatic, operatic, almost, to get my point across. Two, I did story time for toddlers for ten years, so even though they spoke English, they didn’t have an attention span. So again, it made me realize that instead of having people sit through a bland reading, making it come alive was a gift for them. For toddlers and adults, I mean, our attention spans are not something to be proud of these days [laughs]. Three, I went through these brain injuries that recalibrated my entire life, and it felt like divine interference to bring me into this world. I thought to myself, these ancestors and guides did not go through all that trouble to get me here just to sit there and not own my power and my presence, like I am supposed to be up there. I think a lot of people are nervous, and I understand. I get nervous too. But if nervousness leads to I don’t belong on this stage , the audience will know it immediately. So when I am up there, I know I am supposed to be up there. Even if it’s only for five minutes, that stage is mine, and nobody else’s. As an introvert, it is the only time I don’t have to interrupt anybody, I don’t have to time my response, I don’t have to wait for the right moment to jump in and say, Here’s what I think … No! I get to set the pace. So I lean into that.  I think most people want to see you succeed because they want to succeed. So if you’re bombing, they feel like they’re bombing. But if you’re killing it up there, there’s killing it up there too. It is almost like the audience wants to be up there with you and wants to root for you. On a more technical level, what I would do is plan the very first word you’re going to say when you’re up there, whether it’s “Hello!” or “Welcome!” or “What’s Up!” because once that happens and the audience responses to you, then the rest comes naturally. Another tip: if at all possible, memorize at least one of your lines from your poems, so you can look up and make a connection. The printed poem is the rough draft to the performance, if that makes sense. And what I’ve seen, that I would have never imagined, is these middle-aged cis men who are really connecting with my poems because it takes them to this time of childhood with their grandmothers or with someone that they’ve lost. So I learn more the more I perform, based on audience feedback. So I hope it’s not something people are scared of, but something they embrace. CC:  I love that. Is there a particular poem that you love to perform? VG:  Oh yeah! These days, it’s the “Comadre” poem; it’s a prayer of finding your bestie. When I wrote that poem, I was lonely as heck, but that poem got me my comadre because I was vulnerable and specific and insistent that I wanted a bestie, dammit [laughs].  CC:  I love it. It’s almost like a spell. I like to see poems that, sometimes subconsciously, are these prayers and manifestations that we don’t even know we’re writing. It’s like an incantation, you know? It obviously worked for you; you have several now.  VG: It did. I am so lucky. I had to voice it. Again, throat chakra stuff.  CC:  Speaking specifically to Brava , it has a lot to do with the body. Both its struggles and its celebrations of the body, the sensuality, and the pain it brings, and how it fails us. Could you talk about how you approach writing into the body, into the senses? VG: I have been a very cerebral person for most of my life and have been rewarded for getting good grades in school and making the family look good. So for a long time, I put my body last because I felt like it was shameful. In many cultures, but especially in traditional Mexican households, girls are taught shame as a way of controlling their sensuality and autonomy. I bought into that for a very, very long time. About a decade ago, I was at a poetry festival in New York City, and I forgot who was speaking, but someone from the audience shared, “Our bodies are the longest and most intimate relationship that we’ll ever have in our lifetimes,” and this triggered the crap out of me at the time cause I thought Ugh! [laughs], I don’t like that, that makes me uncomfortable . It took me a very long time to realize that I was being very unkind to my body because it didn’t look the way I wanted it to look. There are different ages where I’ve wanted different things. There was a season I wanted bigger calves because I wanted fuller legs, and I think that a lot of us have those hang-ups. But then, when I experienced my brain injuries, my body rebelled and said, okay we’re just going to do the bare minimum now . And it didn’t matter what my calves looked like, what mattered was that my legs were able to take me to the restroom, shower, and all of things. It started being less about what I wanted my body to be, and more about the things that my body did for me all the time without me even giving a thanks. Once I started demilitarizing myself in that structure where intelligence was my entire sense of worth for a very long time, the brain injuries made me a C+ adult, where I was an A+ adult for so much of life. But C+ is alright, my body does what it does. I am grateful to her for having more way more wisdom than my brain has. My body remembers. My body honors. My sacredness, my existence, you know, I carry the blood of my ancestors and of my family. In the long term, do I want to look hot or have peace? And it took me a long time to realize that, to do what I need to do in this lifetime, I needed to stop the war with myself. And that’s what “Bless My Inconvenient Body” is about. We don’t have to be enemies. We can actually be besties. And she’s one of my homes, this body of mine is one of my homes. And I best respect her, cause she has a lot of power. CC: Yes. That’s so well put. I relate to that struggle. I’d love to dive into one of your poems. Could you read “A Veces Me Pongo Brava” for us? VG:   Reads “A Veces Me Pongo Brava”. Click here to hear her poem. CC: Thank you. I love this poem. There’s so much strength. It reminded me of Sandra Cisneros’ poetry in Loose Women , with its punctuation. There’s a strength even in the uncertainty, and the quieter moments of the ending, too. I specifically wanted to talk about the moment about Flaco Jimenez. You address the audience with the line, “There I go with the lies again, I don’t drink tequila, and I barely listen to Flaco, just hoped I’d win points with my people.” When I heard this poem for the first time, that stanza was stuck in my head because I had never heard a poet, specifically a Mexican-American poet in San Antonio, reference this desire to connect, even if it means embellishing. And I love that. That’s so real, that desire to connect with our culture and people, even if it doesn’t speak true to our own experiences. Could you talk about this moment? What inspired you to write that line? That stanza? VG:  Yeah, so I’m from San Antonio. I grew up in Mexico, and I speak Spanish. My family barely spoke any English; I mean my parents did not speak English conversationally or for fun. So I am very Mexicana, but in some ways, because of my skin color and colorism, again, I was rewarded growing up for acting more white than Mexican. Which, at the time, felt like a success story. I felt this responsibility to elevate my family out of poverty, and to do that, I felt I had to be a professional. And to do that, I was taught to get along with dominant culture people, and again, it felt like a success story until I thought, oh wait, my own people don’t know who I am  or don’t know that I’m Mexicana like them. Growing up, for a long time, I thought it was important to be monetarily successful, but I realized no one was claiming me. My culture wasn’t claiming me. It wasn’t like, she is not one of ours; she’s one of theirs. Especially living in Portland for a very long time, I felt like my own culture was slipping away from me. And there are times when the more performative, flashy elements of our culture are celebrated, so you go oh yeah, I drink tequila, I listen to Flaco, don’t ask me for one of his song titles, I don’t know him, but I am going to be like yeah!  in moments of desperation. I have always felt like I could belong anywhere, but I didn’t actually belong anywhere. There were times when I was just desperate to be one of my own people. So I did feel like it was vulnerable to call myself a liar because I didn’t want people to think I lie about everything cause I don’t, but I felt like it was important to own up to, sometimes, in order to fit in, we peer pressure ourselves into being one of the crowd when in fact, there are so many different types of Mexicans and I just happen to be one of them. So in moments of strength, I remember that, but sometimes it isn’t always easy. CC:  That’s so real, though, and so human in a way that a lot of us don’t talk about in fear of the shame, the vulnerability, which is why I love this moment in the poem. I think there are certain trigger words at a poetry reading in San Antonio, and you get the audience reaction. It’s the conchas. VG: YES! YES! CC: You could do a whole concha anthology. It’s a whole subgenre of Chicano poetry. We just don’t talk about it, or maybe there are academic essays talking about it, but it’s not a conversation I’ve seen. So I love that you brought that into Brava . VG:  And I wrote this poem before Flaco Jimenez died, so now when I perform, I say, “que en paz descanse,” which is not in the book.  CC:  I love that addition. You referenced the “Comadre” poem earlier. Could you read that for us and then talk about it a little bit? VG:   Reads "Comadre ". Click here to read her poem. CC:  I love hearing that one, it’s so joyous and so vulnerable and has that element of humor that so many of your poems hold, while simultaneously holding the harder things, the vulnerability, the loneliness. I’d like to hear you talk about this balance, how you bring humor into your poetry. What draws you to placing humor in these poems of yours? VG:  I think humor is something that helps us get through the really difficult times. To me, laughter and grief are part of the same coin. My best friend who I dedicate this book, told me once, “I can’t tell if you’re crying or laughing, they sound the same,” when we’d be on the phone, and it was the truth. I laugh and cry in the same way. Like many of us, life is very painful at times, and the only way to get through it sometimes, even if it’s just me making myself laugh, I’m not saying I’m trying to make everybody laugh, humor is so subjective, but for me, if I am having a good time with my poem, then I find other people tend to come along. In part because I am such a drama queen, that even when I suffer, I make myself laugh from the sheer drama. I’m grateful that people call this a humorous book, because it did make me laugh, and I hope it does the same for others, but I would never say that I set out to write a funny book of poetry, because then people are going to look at it and be like, that’s not funny. But to me, the more I read it, the more it makes me laugh at times when I thought it would be the opposite, that I would be hardened to the humor, but no, it is the laughter that keeps on giving to me.  CC:  You know, I feel like that is very in the Chicanx tradition of poetry, too, that I’ve seen a lot in San Antonio. Bringing in that humor feels rare sometimes in the poetry space; there are so many spaces that are very serious and silent, which at certain moments is appropriate, but I think there’s always more room for humor, especially in poetry. There’s nothing better than making people laugh at a poetry reading, I feel. I’m sure you feel the same way. VG:  Oh yeah, it’s the best. It’s the best [laughs]. CC:  I’d like to talk about your artistic inspirations for Brava . What poets and poems were you in conversation with or inspired by while writing these poems that ended up in Brava ? VG:  You know, I think I’m constantly inspired by, especially here in the San Antonio community.. I’ve been drawn to your work, and to the work of Yesika Salgado in L.A., and, of course, to the work of Sandra Cisneros. There’s also Analicia Sotelo from Houston, who’s amazing. Saúl Hernández, too, what a badass. I also take a lot of inspiration from musical stars like Juan Gabriel, Tori Amos, to some extent, Fiona Apple, a lot of those songstresses. Even Kate Bush, The Beatles. In fact, in a way, “A Veces Me Pongo Brava” was inspired by the work of the later Beatles; it feels like two different songs in one, so I have two different poems in one. It could have been two different poems, but it was the cosmic coin, you know, two different signs, so I find that I’m inspired by artists in general. Oh, also the cartoonists, Lynda Berry, Malaka Gharib and Nicole Georges. CC:  I love the range, and I love what you said about the eight-minute-long Beatles song with a secret song at the end, when you think the album is over. On that note of inspiration and process, I noticed a lot of these shorter lines and sometimes words broken up across multiple lines, specifically in “La Tiendita” and “Inheritance.” Could you talk about this stylistic choice? What inspired your line breaks and enjambment?  VG:  I love working with white space on the page. Even in my weaving, I wove this whole piece [points to piece she made], and you’ll notice some white almost as if they’re line breaks themselves. So for me, I need to breathe when I’m reading a poem. You know, I’m an earth sign that’s sustained a constellation of concussions, so slow burn is my jam and always has been. I take my time on the page. And part of that is because I want to make sure that some of these lines really shine and don’t get buried in with all the text. I think more claustrophobic forms are effective, but I find that I have a hard time understanding all of that, and part of that is because of my TBI-imposed ADHD. I find that when I do use those line breaks, I really slow down the reader, and it’s up to them on how they want to read it and how they want to receive it. But for me, I need to be able to feel like I’m stepping on the ground, slowly almost like Thich Nhat Hahn, really savoring the meaning and moment. And that’s meaningful to me, which is why the cover also has so much white space as well, because originally, she was this creature engulfed by everything else, but by widening out her hips and giving her some bluebonnets and picking flowers, she’s resting into the moment and being in the moment. CC:  That makes sense that it does create a mindfulness, a slowing down, a lengthening the poem, staying in that moment, and you know something else I noticed in Brava, the range of topics that you approach is varied, like we have comadres, we have the body, we have home, we have loss, we have Ulvalde, we have a personal poem about a friend of yours that was killed by a drunk driver. We have these intense moments alongside the aforementioned humor and lighter moments, but I’d like to know the process for determining what you were going to include in this collection. And how did you approach your process of including certain poems in Brava ? VG:  Yeah, when I first started writing poetry, I was going through a very traumatizing breakup, and really exploring poetry was a healing modality. As an ugh, like let me excrete this from my skin, from my pores, and that was a wonderful practice. I thought, “I really want to publish this grief collection.” But I found that while those poems were good and my editor at the time said, yeah these are great, I didn’t want to revisit so much of that pain, like I’ve already gotten past it, and books take a long time to get published, and like, some of these poems in Brava that just came out were written two years ago. But I wanted to enjoy this collection. I wanted it to be deep, I wanted it to be medicine, but I didn’t want it to feel like I was cringing at the thought of this book. Some of that I learned from Rioberto Gonzalez at the Macondo Writing Workshop: you don’t want to keep retriggering yourself. You want to be able to enjoy, and I’ve seen some writers when their books come out, they’ve had enough of the book and they don’t want to revisit it again, but for me, I wanted it to feel honest, truthful, you know difficult at times, but feel like even though I could go into those depths, I could come out easily. So even though there’s only sixteen poems, when I go to readings, I have my pick of do I want to do a sensual poem: do I want to do a funny poem? A sad poem? I like the fact that I am a bit of a wild card when it comes to poetry; there’s so much for me to choose from. I like having that range because, depending on what’s going on in the world, I might choose a specific poem. Right after the Texas floods in July, I had a reading, and I was able to do the Uvalde poem and tie it to that current event. So I feel like she’s just a rich field of wildflowers, and I can pick whatever I want for any given moment. And I want to thank my editor, John Espinoza, for helping me winnow down the collection. I gave him about 36 poems and he cut it to about half that had a narrative, so I am grateful that someone told me to make sure to get an editor because it really helped me feel like I could step outside of myself and get that help so that it would make sense to others. CC:  That’s such a good point about having variety, like having any given situation you’re in, you have different poems that speak to what the audience's needs are in the moment or what the event calls for. I think that’s brilliant to have that in a chapbook. There’s only so much you can do in 30-40 pages, but Brava  proves that you can have so much variety in one collection. This brings me to my next question, if there any projects or anything on the horizon that you’re working on currently? VG:  There are a few things that I’m proud of. I’ve composed an instrumental classical music album, which will be released in 2026. I’ve collaborated with the University of Incarnate Word and their music therapy department to make it work, and it’s been exciting. We finished recording it, and mixing is next. And I’m also working on a fully Spanish-language collection of essays about leaving Mexico as a child, coming back as an adult, and feeling all these hollows in my body from being torn away from that first homeland. I mean, technically, I was born in the States, but I moved there when I was four, so that felt like my homeland for a very long time. And I’m working on a hybrid poetry graphic memoir about brain injuries. So, it is a full load over here, but I am mentioning it because I’m manifesting support for all of these projects because they’re all very different and in some ways, I’m taking on more than I can chew, but that’s on purpose because the help will come. I am especially looking for help with learning how to draw better. CC:  You’re doing so much in different genres, like you have music, you have essays, you have a hybrid memoir, that’s awesome. VG:  Yeah, I can’t seem to stay in one lane [laughs]. CC: Yeah, do it all! VG:  Yeah, do it all! With the time that we have. CC:  Lastly, I wanted to ask if there were any musicians, artists, poets, or anything that you want to shout out or have people put on their radar. Whether it’s forthcoming or it’s been out for 50 years. VG:  In terms of collections of poetry that are coming out from local San Antonio poets, I’m really excited about Osmani Ochoa’s chapbook, Once We Were Rebels,  from Maíz Poppin Press and also Alejandra “La Mera Mera” Sanchez-Alaniz is coming out with Lip Liturgy from Mouthfeel Press in January of 2027 I believe. I am also excited for the anonymous fuzzball graphic novel by Nicole Georges. And I was going to say the new Chet Baker album. No one ever told me about Chet Baker when I was growing up, and I discovered him a couple years ago and thought, how come nobody told me? I especially adore early Chet Baker. Like just cause I’m Mexican, no one told me about this! [laughs]. But I live.  CC:  It is messed up, it’s the assumption that we wouldn’t be into it! But I’m glad you discovered it now. CC: Thank you so much for talking about Brava , poetry, inspiration, and everything. I greatly appreciate it. If people want to purchase Brava  or follow you, where should they head? VG:  Yes, so if you want to go to my website at violetagarza.com , I am also a performance doula, so I help with performing in front of audiences. We work together to get to the root of what makes you nervous, but also why you keep coming back to it. On Instagram, I am at @violeta.poeta. Thank you so much for this opportunity, it’s been so lovely. I also want to give a shout out to my press, First Matter Press, which has been so kind to me, and I’ve learned a lot about this process from them. Cloud Delfina Cardona is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains , winner of the 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and the past is a jean jacket , winner of the Hub City Press BIPOC Poetry Series. Cardona is the cofounder of Infrarrealista Review, a nonprofit that publishes Texan writers. She is an associate at Letras Latinas.

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

references to basketball in this collection, I want to ask you the same question I asked Anthony Cody in an interview

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

Before talking with Isabel Duarte-Gray about her revision process, she sent me the following collection of notes toward and commentary about her debut collection, Even Shorn, winner of the 2019 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. After Dr. Duarte-Gray received some early editorial guidance from poet Jorie Graham, the book was published by Sarabande Books and edited by Sarabande editor-in-chief Sarah Gorham. As you'll see in the PDF below, both Jorie and Sarah are mentioned in the author's commentary on her drafts. We met on Zoom to talk about “The Shrew Ash.” Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): It was so cool to see your handwriting on the page. The way your lists were arranged made me wonder, do you always keep lists like that? Was there like a specific reason you were documenting Kentucky this way? Isabel Duarte-Gray (IDR): I always do keep lists. But I think in that particular case, I started writing the book when my little brother was applying to a scholarship and I was very stressed out about it because I had noticed that all the men in my family died in these horrible ways. And I was trying to put my finger on why the White southern side of my family is like this. Why is hopelessness so entrenched? I was scared that my little brother wouldn’t go to college or that something bad would happen to him. We’d had a suicide at twenty-two. One of my other cousins fell off a balcony and died. We had so many things like that. So it started as an elegy cycle for all these men. The book was written not really for him, but with the crisis of his future in mind, and so I was trying to get a sense of the history that led us to get there. I was in Cambridge and Cambridge and Amherst when I was writing that book, and so writing lists was also helping me get a grasp on the materiality of the space. Half the book was research and half the book was me calling my mom and contending with her enormous archive of weird stories that I just wanted to catch. Also, I do have obsessive compulsive disorder. I go into dives, deep, deep research dives, and that’s where most of my scholarly work comes from. That was probably also part of this enormous output that happened very rapidly. And then I had to stop and make sense of it. BTR: Yeah, I noticed that there was so much in your notes and also in your first drafts that reveal a lot of family history that didn’t make it into the final poem. Do you have a philosophy around how removed a poem needs to be from personal narrative? IDG: I don’t know that I have a philosophy about that. There was definitely an ethics to who I was writing about. If I were writing about only myself, I wouldn’t have a problem editing it down or removing stuff. But I was writing about people who died before the book was written, and some of the stories were quite personal. So part of the formal poetics of the book are about trying to find a way to say it without being appropriative. Like my cousin Tony fell off that balcony and part of me genuinely thinks it’s because he became an alcoholic because he was queer and he was in the closet and not in the closet at the same time and my family really didn’t tolerate him being gay. And I didn’t think it would be appropriate to say “I think this is because of homophobia,” but that was what it was coming from. I think the poetics and the obsessive detail of location and language and narrative and going back into deeper and deeper history is partly about trying to compensate for the fact that I don’t know what I can say. I don’t want to call it poetic tact, but maybe an ethics of poetic license. Maybe that’s a form of negative capability. BTR: In “The Shrew Ash,” the last line of the first stanza in your first draft—which becomes the last line of the whole poem—takes on a much more distinctive voice. How important was it to you to capture the Kentucky dialect? Was that a goal of your revision? IDG: Yes, definitely. I listened to a lot of oral histories and what I noticed was the accent. It was real specific. And at the time, I didn’t have access to the sound of that accent, because the one from two generations ago was really different from the one that you’d hear in my mom’s mouth. So I don’t have the native accent in the same way, but I did grow up hearing it. I always feel really weird about that when I perform them, because I think some locals are like, “You don’t sound exactly right. Why do you get to claim this?” And it’s like, I grew up here. I’m biracial and complicated and shaped by many different regions. And so when I read in person, I often will listen to those recordings before I read to try and see if I can get it right. I was reading Faulkner a lot of the time that I was writing this. I was looking at the way he writes Darl and Dewey Dell, where there is room for poetry within an attempt to capture a particularity of place. And so, I think there is poetic license within what the accent sounds like. I was looking for this kind of rhythm and poetry of a place and how the fatalism of some of these people is reflected in even the syntax, in the, the mode of expression. BTR: When I was comparing your drafts, I was impressed with how close the first stanza is to the final version. Do you edit as you draft, or do you write the poem in your head before you write it down? IDG: No, I don’t edit a lot when I draft. There are some poems that are heavily edited, but a lot of them just came out like that. I do this excessive, excessive, excessive research, and then I front load my short-term memory and then wait until I’m sleepy. A lot of my drafting happens either in a caffeine rush or at two o’clock in the morning. It’s when my subconscious can produce things. So it often just comes out like that and then I’ll piece it together or only take the parts that I like. The edit on “The Shrew Ash” was a kind of compromise between what’s comprehensible to me and what’s comprehensible to everyone else. BTR: That makes me think about how much trust you put in Sarah Gorham as your editor. Her suggestions essentially become the revisions, at least in the poems you showed me. Has working on this book with Sarah changed your relationship to being edited or sharing your work with fellow poets? IDG: Yes. I started writing the book in November of 2017 and it got picked up in August of 2019. So I hadn’t written poetry in eight years before I did that, and I really hadn’t written much poetry at all. I don’t have an MFA, so I’d never been edited before. And so I was not prepared, didn’t know what I was doing. I ended up calling Jorie [Graham] and being like, “how many of these edits do I have to take?” And Jorie looked at all the edits and was like, “these are great.” So part of it was getting mediation from someone more experienced, whom I deeply trust. Did I cry? Absolutely. Do I think the edits were right? Yeah. Some of them I disagreed with a little bit, I fought about a couple of them, but “The Shrew Ash” wasn’t one of them. I think Sarah was right with that edit. And it did make me realize the power of reducing something. Part of it taught me humility. I just didn’t have enough experience of either rejection or praise. I just was like, “This is my intent. This is what I’m trying to do. And the vision is full and complete.” And so I had to make space for [Sarah’s] vision within my vision, which was right. In retrospect, I found out that’s unusual. Some of my friends who had books coming out around the same time didn’t get edits at all. So part of what it was I didn’t realize the degree of generosity I was receiving. Other people’s input can be scary, but it was a gift. BTR: How did Jorie become involved with your process? IDG: I was at Harvard at the time. Jorie took me into her workshop in spring of 2019. And She’s incredibly generous. She’ll say to everyone in her workshop, “Send me your manuscript.” Did I have a manuscript at the time? No. But she said send me the manuscript, and so I did. And she put every single poem in order. She chose a title and she would write on each page where she thought I should submit the poems. That is a crazy amount, given who she is and how much demand there is for her time. You come in with no book and you leave with a book. BTR: So Jorie was kind of your editor before you had an editor. IDG: It’s true. I mean, she put the book in order. I hadn’t really anticipated submitting it that year or at all. And she gave me the confidence that it was a manuscript. And she also helped me understand how you find an internal narrative within a larger sequence. BTR: I’ve worked and talked with many poets who, though they may have several books out, have not had that type of editorial relationship. IDG: Once the poem’s out, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. People will make all the meaning they want out of it. They’ll like the poem that you like the least. You can get really wrapped up in your own intentions, and having another person mediate is totally valuable. If you have too much vision and too much license, you become too self-indulgent, too much, not enough editing. Editing is a gift. I hope when I am finally ready with this new book that it will be a more normal process and I will be more confident about what’s in it and how it’s framed. But what I lacked in confidence and know-how was compensated for by having the confidence and know-how of truly gifted writers who wanted my voice in the world. BTR: Was there anything else that we didn’t get a chance to talk to that you feel would be important to include? IDG: I thought you might want to know about the relationship between the book’s lack of external Latinidad and the fact that I’m a Latina writer. BTR: It didn’t strike me as that strange. Maybe there is a sense that Latinos have to sound a certain way on the page or have to write about certain topics. But as a Latina writer, I would hate to be perpetuating any kind of stereotype by only writing about a few things. IDG: That’s what my dissertation is actually about. Latinos should be free to write about whatever, but in many ways the market’s particular idea of what being Latino, it does feel kind of split. There’s a fissure between my academic work, which is entirely Latinx, or it was at the time. I have a certain imposter syndrome about my own Latina-ness, and it doesn’t come from not thinking I’m Latina, but I’m only kind of bilingual. And my father is a Chicano playwright. I grew up with this particular idea of Chicano-ness, with this really particular idea of like Luis Valdez inspired bilingual poetry. But I didn’t get raised bilingual, I was raised with my mom in this little trailer in the middle of nowhere. And so, people often don’t register me as being as Latina as I personally feel. I’m always worried because I did such a Southern book that it seems like I was trying to move away from my Latina identity. And the press was very serious about making it clear that I was Latina, which I really did appreciate, but it also made me feel like an imposter. It always will. I often feel so alienated when I try to sit down and write about my Latino-ness. Like, I have a section in my drafts that’s just “attempted Latino poems,” and I write where it feels fake for me to be doing that. Someday, I think I will find the correct voice to write about it. Isabel Duarte-Gray is the author of Even Shorn (Sarabande 2021). She was born in Oakland, California and raised in a trailer in western Kentucky. She earned her PhD in American literature at Harvard University and teaches literature and creative writing at Loyola University New Orleans. 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.

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

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 ,

Incited by his neighbor’s persistence as a singer, Francisco Márquez drafted a poem he called “Apartment Music.” But, as he revisited and reworked, molding and reshaping that first draft, he arrived at something entirely new. To uncover the vase hiding within the clay, he stacked new drafts, stray lines, and rearranged stanzas on top of the last, creating a document of reverse chronology where each new version usurps the last. In the document below, you’ll find the many iterations of “Apartment Music,” which eventually became “Lullaby” and was published by the Poetry Foundation. Below that, you'll find my conversation with Marquez about the revision process. Brittany Torres Rivera (BTR): Thank you so much for sending me that progress document. It was so cool to essentially watch you work. Francisco Márquez (FM): Of course. It's really vulnerable, but it's also great because I take revision very seriously. I also think it’s valuable to intimately share these details because revision is rarely taught, one usually has to learn it on their own, and it takes so much work and time. BTR: In the first draft, but also the notes that precede it, the neighbor and his singing seem to be the focus of the poem. And yet the boy's tower from the mother's song becomes a focal point as revealed by the many renderings of that line in your revision notes. So, how do you locate the heart of a poem? And how often does it depart from that inciting observation? FM: Sometimes I know what the central image is and I write toward that. But part of the process is staying open to the idea that the thing you're obsessing over actually may not serve you in the end. And that was the process with this. I had a neighbor who spent all his time singing. I was dealing with my own things with my writing so I found it inspiring that he would just practice a run of notes over and over again. He was very focused on his practice and it was a little annoying but also kind of charming; he would almost never hit the high note, but he never had any qualms about listening to the song again. That was enough to get me going. As you can probably tell, I tried to keep that initial premise as much as possible in many drafts. And it got to the point where I almost gave up on the poem because it felt like maybe the story wasn't good enough—and that realization was the hinge moment. In the revision process, if the central image that I have starts weighing the poem down or weighing me down, then I know that the heart is elsewhere. In this case, the heart of the poem came when I realized that the poem is about music, about me asking myself: what song could I hear over and over again? BTR: It's evident in the drafts how long you spent with this image of the singer before it became more about music in general. Do you consider the work and the effort toward perfecting these images that don't end up in this poem a loss? How do you cope when the final ends up so far removed from what you spent the most time on? FM: I have this deep faith in the fact that if the image is really powerful, it will find itself back even in a new form, in a new orientation, in a different kind of language. The spirit of that image will come back. And I've tried to practice a kind of detachment from the images because I think a lot of my really early poems would not find their footing because I was too narrow in my focus. I've found that the poems are so much better if I let them inhabit the best potential of themselves. Almost like in a relationship—you don't want to control the other person to meet your needs, you want to meet them halfway, see how you both can compromise. If I'm trying too hard to explain the mechanics of the story, it's not going to work. It shouldn't be that hard to tell you what is happening: that's my tell. BTR: You tried out a few forms for this poem: it started as a single stanza with long lines, then it became a stanza of small paragraphs, then couplets, tercets, back to one stanza, and then you eventually landed on short quatrains. Is changing the form a tool for revision or a result of revision? FM: I see it as a tool, definitely. I like to work in these organic forms because I find that the key to the poem is in the length of the lines, the way they work in tandem with form. Nine times out of ten, the heart will start becoming clear through the way the lines work as a unit in their stanzas. I'll start finding the rhythm of the language and I'll start getting an idea of how quickly or slowly the poem should move. Couplets are great but sort of slow, so if I think a poem is already slowish, and I put it into couplets, it's going to drag things down a little bit. If I want something to be more narrative and move quicker, then a tercet is perfect because it's sort of unstable. And then quatrains are much slower, but they're more formal, more measured. So, when you see me changing it around like that, something's not working. I gotta try this, I gotta try that. BTR: I also noticed that you segment the poem and work on each part. Can you describe how that factors into your process? FM: A lot of this comes from Catherine Barnett, a grad school teacher of mine. She was a revision maniac; her expression was “keep the clay wet,” meaning keep molding it, keep pushing it around. She also taught expansion and compression. So I find that if the image is limited, in this case the singer, I'll just write into it more. I tell myself, this is really interesting, so why don't I try fleshing it out? On a page toward the end of that progress document, there are these long lyrical lines where I just wrote out what I was thinking, and I think that's another way in which I segment the poem. If I feel like I'm walking around the thing, as an exercise, I’ll try to literally say what I mean, not try to hide it in any kind of lyrical language. I'll ask myself, what is this really about? It's about me being interested in having a relationship with art like my neighbor. Sometimes you just have to say it, even to yourself. BTR: In lines about the boy, you used words like “martyr,” “rapturous,” “pious,” and “faithful” to elicit his religious devotion, which is present for many early drafts and hints at artistic devotion. Do you often create that kind of image system or does that come when you've latched onto a theme or topic? FM: It's hard to say. In the case of this poem, I was desperate to find a metaphor, but I wasn’t sure what it had to be. I think one way of going about it was by realizing that the lullaby my mom used to sing was a religious song, and so I knew there was a strong connection there. I do see writing as a discipline and a faith, a kind of monastic thing you have to keep doing forever. But even though that could serve as a strong metaphor for the ending, it felt forced. So, most of the time, I think the image system comes organically for me. If I'm trying to quickly tie in a thing at the end, then I know—not in the moment, but afterwards—that I'm trying to force the image. These short poems are usually the harder ones to write because I have to travel the entire journey before I look back and say, “what was this really about?” Typically, however, when the final poem is much shorter than the drafts, the images stay in the DNA; I think the image system serves the poem, but almost like a ghost. I end up refracting the end through it. BTR: I can totally see that function: the ghost of the image system as a vehicle to get the poem to where it wants to go. FM: Yeah, and it was very exciting in this case to realize that, in a way, the final image was the most intimate image. It was the image that was closest to me, to my memory, to meaning, the most sacred image I had. I don't know if it's always like that, but in this case, I was happy that the thing that made it at the end was the truest thing. BTR: Was there anything else about the revision process for “Lullaby” that you would want people to know? FM: The final draft at the end of the progress document that I sent to you was as close to a solid draft that I could get. When I reached this end, I was feeling a little frustrated. And then I opened a whole new document and wrote the poem as it's been published. So, this document almost served as a pre-thinking. And when it clicked, it totally clicked. It felt like a risk to abandon all of it, but then as soon as it happened, I said, oh, this is it. There's the music, there's the beat. If I ever want to try something radical, I'll always open a whole new document, and it helps me to see these not as drafts, but as experiments. An opportunity for me to try a new version of the poem, one to which I don't have to be wedded. Most of the time, if I let myself have that kind of playful permission, it ends up being much better for me—and for the poem. Francisco Márquez is a Venezuelan poet with work in The Yale Review, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, and The Slowdown podcast. The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, UCross, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he lives in Brooklyn. 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.

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

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.