Latino/a Featured Poets

Rodney Gomez @ Ostrich Review

Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and CantoMundo fellow, Rodney Gomez’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, Barrow Street, Texas Poetry Review, and other journals and anthologies. He was an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and writer-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2012. His poem “Feast Day, Farm Road 511,” is currently featured over at The Ostrich Review (founded and edited by Nayelly Barrios). Grounded in the landscape of South Texas, Rodney Gomez offers a poem that mirrors it:

At the field’s navel

     my father caulked

          around a smoldering

horse, head & mane

     hissing into obsidian

          blades, fasting

into lamplight.

He slowly peels corn

     like a wave machine.

          The cars loud as hooves.

The pit roars up like cotton,

     the odor of speed

          winding down

to death.

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Carmen Calatayud @ Verse Daily

D.C.-based poet Carmen Calatayud is the author of In the Company of Spirits (Press 53). Her poem “Transfiguration between the Graves” (from In the Company of Spirits) has been reprinted in Verse Daily, a daily publication dedicated to “republishing” and promoting poets one poem a day. 

Carmen’s “Transfiguration between the Graves” like many of the poems in her debut collection, blurs the line between the world of the sacred and the political, between the  personal and the spiritual:

I want to take my nerves

and drag them from the mud,

prove the moon isn’t mechanical

and warn away from god-sized lies.

I want to watch headstones dance and

collapse, and turn into green smoke

I could never see before.

I want to sit in the broken rain.

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Tomás Q. Morín @ The Paris American

Tomás Q. Morín is the winner of the 2012 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his collection A Larger Country. His poems have appeared in Slate, Threepenny Review, Boulevard, New England Review, and Narrative. His poem “Circus Pony” is currently featured at the Paris American.

“Circus Pony,” like many of the other poems in A Larger Country reflects not only Morín’s mastery of narrative and story telling but also his use of rich and lush language and which create poems that are both bold and imaginative:

What joy to say our short, winter days

are behind us now. Gone the old life we filled

with empty laughter, the times we’d pack

the backseat with every hitchhiking clown

we happened upon—our record was eight

until the year our fathers died. Gone

the red-nosed hours, our grotesque smiles

drawn large and wide, when we rehearsed

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