Moving to a new part of the country means getting accustomed to a new set of seasons. It is newly October, and while the leaves are turning, the weather seems to be fighting the season change here in Cincinnati.
Or maybe this is the season change.
This kind of indefinite feeling – which only comes from rooting one’s self up and relocating to a new context – is very much the kind of place poetry comes from.
There’s a term we use in teaching English Composition when talking about feeling one’s way through unknown material, that instead of fighting it one must wallow in complexity – I love that! It’s like advice for life.
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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