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In Celebration of Poetry

For National Poetry Month, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to feature the exceptional collections of some of our most inspiring poets. Debut publications, award-winning volumes, and cherished Press classics are all included here.


The Rivers Are Inside Our Homes handles themes of loss and exile, fable and fairy tale, marriage and hurt, with the island of Cuba at its heart. These incandescent poems by Cuban American poet Victoria María Castells explore how we can salvage our notion of paradise in an overspent Eden. Confronting machismo, illness, heartbreak, and isolation, the poems depict how women are at the mercy of men, either husband or oligarch. Yet all generations of Cubans are bombarded with this need to return or to leave, to have both, to have neither.

Andrew
As a child my mother
fought against the door.
She tried to hold the sofa
against the buckling thing,
praying her weight to fatten
to gold as the door became a wing
reaching in, and in, and in,
a rippling shield changed
to a hinge of evil while a few yards away
the ceiling rippled, levitated
and fluttered back, and the tree fell,
the car crushed under it;

Winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Stepmotherland, Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. Exploring a complex range of emotions, this collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.

African Klan Suit #2
What a revolution when
such art paints history
where it’s been erased
and can be worn
with a little elegance
to give us life,
a necessary
grace.

Auto/Body, winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, connects the vulnerability of the narrating queer body to the language of auto mechanics to reveal their shared decadence. Raised in and near auto body shops, Vickie Vértiz remembers visiting them to elevate the family car to examine what’s underneath, to see what’s working and what’s not. The poetry in this book is also a body shop, but instead we take our bodies, identities, desires, and see what’s firing. In this shop we ask: What needs changing? How do our bodies transcend ways of being we have received so that we may become more ourselves?

Three Girls in a Subway
What’s in the dark is why you stopped talking to me
Maybe I took up too much space. Or not enough
We’re enough, I know because someone just texted me
You know what stop we’re taking
So
We’re enough and I know
Because someone
Just reminded me
Wherever we meet is home
One—nothing—without the other

Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Privileging journey over destination, Zamora’s poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things.

& WINGS MADE OF MATCH STICKS
                              & how the page, before you, blots back 
                              vision   with   presence   of   all    colors. 
                              Closer,  in  reflection,  maker?  Harsh  & 
                              soft light,  in simultaneous flux.  It’s not 
                              that  nothing  exists  first;   instead  the 
                              fullness consumes & requires speech: a 
                              hue completely desaturated…

In Magnificent Errors, Sheryl Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. The poems are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.

The Transgression

We feel we learn our traumas too late, but we are as 

children. Our heart, some days, an orchestra suddenly

aflame. Closing our eyes, we see our salmon-lit dawn, 

and it is no transgression to look towards 

ourselves with awe.

Underdays is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other. We encounter many voices in life: from friends and family, from media, from co-workers, from other artists. In a highly connected global world, where people and entities are electronically enmeshed, we filter these voices constantly to get to what we determine to be the truth. 

Fruits of Labors
There is one surgeon that goes in to save
his legs with a pinnate precision, arteries
flushed, and who stays at his bedside
after rounds, after the new heart reboots.
The taste of the jam boiled and jarred
from fly-filled afternoons fills us still.
He is unconscious for more than a week,
with dreams that make me wonder about
what will come after the jam disappears
from the pantry, when childhood is near.

The wildly unrestrained poems in Splinters Are Children of Wood, Leia Penina Wilson’s second collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, pose an increasingly desperate question about what it means to be a girl, the ways girls are shaped by the world, and the role myth plays in this coming of age quest. Samoan myths and Western stories punctuate this volume in a search to reconcile identity and education.

We Carve a Spell Gurl
“besides the serpents mother also sent venom from the hydra hallucination
blindness rage bloodlust all ground finely into a powder
   mixed with fresh blood her blood to a boil
 everything must come to a boil inside a great bronze kettle”

The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival. The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide.

onomasticon (or, I sing the names of our dead)
“I sing march, & the earth will tremble out a eulogy, a prayer, a promise
I sing how, & why, & when, & your name will wind my palm into a fist, &
I will hold it high”

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