Latin@ Featured Poets: Spring-Summer 2012

Pablo Miguel Martínez @ 2012 TYCA National Poetry Month Celebration

CantoMundo founding member and Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, Pablo Miguel Martínez is currently featured at the TYCA National Poetry Month Celebration page with his poem “This Valley.” A fifty-six seconds-long audio-poem, this jewel of a poem can be heard here, under the heading “April 28.” “This valley is filled with ghosts” starts this poem that paints a portrait of those whose “ghost hands tilt tired earth” and whose “phantom feet memorize labyrinths of lettuce, beet, and grape.” Whose “ghost work” can be tasted, “even praised” but cannot be seen “with us in this valley.”

            [Listen Here.]

*

Emma Trelles @ Terrain

Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) and winner of the fourth edition of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, is currently featured over at Terrain—an online literary journal that concerns itself with the “built and natural environments”—with three poems, all of which can be heard and enjoyed in Emma’s voice. Here are some favorite lines from the three poems (If you have read this far than “Florida Poem” is a must for you):

From “This Week:”

“how air is an animal draped over skin/ in July. We tracked egrets sailing/ white over us, in pairs, a half hundred,/ until we found them, origami/ folded in the needles of slash pines.”

From “Florida Poem:”

“During drought,/ the heat becomes a devil/ girl with oven-red lips/ who wants your brains puddle/
in a brass-capped mason jar”

From “The Living Hour:”

“The offering is wet/ grass, a whip stitch of bird song./ How does its nickel pitch thread/ April’s blue quartz light?/How does it find hold in the whorl of the ear?”

            [Listen Here.]

*

Xánath Caraza @ KCUR, Kansas City Public Radio

Xánath Caraza, author of the forthcoming Conjuro, to be released in September by Mammoth Press was recently featured on Kansas City public radio with two poems, “Yanga” and “Out of Your Hands,” from her newly released chapbook of Corazón Pintado: Ekphrastic Poems (TL Press, 2012). Twenty percent of the sales of this chapbook will also help raise funds for a summer arts programs for kinds in the Kansas City area.  In “Yanga,” Xánath summons the music and rhythms of Mexico’s little known African heritage through this poem which bears the name of the historical figure whom rose from the shackles of slavery to become the 16^th century revolutionary leader responsible for establishing the first free-settlement in the Americas: San Lorenzo de Los Negros in the state of Veracruz:

“Yanga, Yanga, Yanga

Yanga, Yanga, Yanga

Today, your spirit I invoke

Here, in this place

This, this is my poem for Yanga

Mandinga, malanga, bamba

Rumba, mambo, samba.”

            [Listen Here.]

*

Fred Arroyo @ Words on a Wire

Fred Arroyo is the author of two collections: “The Region of Lost Names” (University of Arizona Press, 2008) and the most recent “Western Avenue and Other Fictions” (University of Arizona Press, 2012) and which chronicles the lives of immigrants living in the U.S. and struggling against an industrial and agricultural world which thrives on their anonymity. These stories are set in Michiana, an area between Indiana and Michigan and which includes South Bend; an area which Arroyo calls a “borderland.” Like “The Region of Lost Names” this new work of fiction is driven by its characters, character which Fred refuses to see as sheer literary inventions but rather as imaginative people, composites of the real people which once made Michiana one of the top three food-producing areas in the country. Fred Arroyo will be at the campus of Notre Dame on October 4^th reading from this new work.  For more Fred Arroyo…

            [Listen Here.]

*

Carmen Tafolla @Sampsonia Way

CantoMundo fellow and first Poet Laureate of the City of San Antonio is featured with the poem “Ocupando Mi Voz” over at Sampsonia Way, an online magazine of literature, free speech and social justice. In March of this year Carmen Tafolla, along with Tony Diaz, participated in a rally hosted by Libro Traficante in San Antonio, Texas. Her poem “Ocupando Mi Voz” is a reminder that in times of social crisis—as is the banning of all things Latino/a in Arizona—the poet, in celebrating the marriage of truth and beauty—can only but aid in changing that reality. Here are some favorite lines:

“a jubilation of our voices’ singing flight.
Behind us the blood-in-our-lungs taste of conquest,
the silencing of tongues, mutilation of spirit,
the victor’s spoils sign branded on our foreheads,
visible on our skin, in our names, on our lips.”

            [Continue Reading.]