Lauren Espinoza
@ Acentos
I first met Lauren Espinoza at this year’s CantoMundo gathering where she was
participating as a student intern. That summer Lauren was slated to begin what
was to be her first semester at M.F.A. Program in Poetry at Arizona State
University.
Lauren Espinoza's poetry has appeared in an anthology
selected by Naomi Shihab Nye entitled Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25,
and, her fiction is online at “Label Me Latina,” and she has work forthcoming
in NewBorder: Anthology. Her two poems “ruins” and “the llorona isn’t
post-modern” are currently featured in the November issue of The Acentos
Review. In “the llorona isn’t post-modern” Lauren remembers Cihuacoatl—the
pre-Columbian Aztec deity associated with child-bearing and a forerunner of the
modern version of “la llorona” who “still after all these centuries, / […]
requires sacrifice that her indigenous counterpart / basked in.”
*
Blas Falconer
@ Poetry Daily
Blas Falconer is the author of The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012);
A Question of Gravity and Light
(University of Arizona Press, 2007); and
The Perfect
Hour (Pleasure Boat
Studio: A Literary Press, 2006). He is also a co-editor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University
of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).
His poem “Homecoming” is currently featured at Poetry Daily. Here is a favorite excerpt,
which for me captures what Stanley Plumly calls “the pastoral [as] the lyric of
a landscape,” that joyous sound by which we near home in the poems in Blas
latest collection The Foundling Wheel
:
“Rain
against the roof sounds like a slow tire
over gravel, as if a friend has come.
over gravel, as if a friend has come.
The
train rumbles through the dark, and my body, tuned
to hear you cry before you cry, stirs.”
to hear you cry before you cry, stirs.”
*
Nayelly Barrios at
Beloit Poetry Journal
One of the most rewarding experiences I had at last year’s
(and my first) AWP in Chicago, was meeting and reading for the first time the
work of Rio Grance Valley native Nayelly Barrios. Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, and
DIAGRAM. She is Co-Editor-in-chief of
Ostrich
Review.
Her poem "Recurring Dream as Tire" is in the
winter 2012-2013 issue of Beloit Poetry
Journal:
“My father
appears at my doorstep
he wears the tire he curled in
when crossing the border
It is
raining
The
tire’s rubber the rain
un espejo
& I can see the weight of my dream
pulling
down
on the soft flesh of my lids
[…]”
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