When I go back to this poem, I’m always taken in by the speed of it. It is deceptive how short the poem is because of how much is in it – humor, rhyme, a certain emotional urgency that I can’t after years of reading the poem seem to find a source for.
It’s just there.
In the tight lines, in the way the word “irrecoverable” takes up its own line and damn you can feel the weight of loss in one word, one word long and wide like open arms.
When asked why she avoids the self-revealing emotions typically identified with contemporary poetry, she responded: If you put ice on your skin, your skin turns pink. Your body sends blood there. If you think about that in terms of writing, cool writing draws us, draws our heat. *
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of seven chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear, Small Fires, Until We Are Level Again, and, most recently, An Empty Pot’s Darkness. His poems, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Prairie Schooner, New South, Poetry International, and The Bind. Born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, he runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and composes erasure poems on the Instagram account @poetryamano. He is also a faculty member in Pine Manor College’s Solstice Low-Residency MFA program. With an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, José is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamander Magazine.
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