like everything else we loved
by Sarah A. Chavez
Chavez’s micro chapbook explores the body and grief in all is messiness. This epistolary collection is both haunting and haunted, the speaker’s voice well-crafted and sure, poems intimate and woven like a spell, a dream so vivid it pulls us in.
Additional Info
EXCERPT
Dear Carole, it hurts to look at things
I think
because I’m seeing
for us both—double
irises and refraction,
double anxiety
and desire, double fear
that this, like everything else
we loved will die
unexpectedly. Maybe
that’s why it’s so hard
even to keep these
black letters in focus.
I am the ink, your ghost skin
the paper, and the moment
I stop writing
you’ll disappear again
taking these words with you.
ABOUT THE POET
Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the poetry collections Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications) and All Day, Talking (dancing girl press). Her new project, Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole, received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award, as well as 2021 residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony & the Macondo Writers Workshop. Chavez teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses at the University of Washington Tacoma and serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology.
ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST
Sonia Romero is a Los Angeles based painter, printmaker, paper-cutter and public artist.
IG: @soniaamaliaromero
NOTES
Work that appears in this chapbook first appeared in: Atticus Review, Flies, Cockroaches, & Poets (Chicana/o Writers Association of Arts), Rogue Agent, and Painted Bride Quarterly.
BOOKS FROM OTHER PRESSES
Hands That Break & Scar (Sundress Publications)
All Day, Talking (dancing girl press)