$15.00

In stock (can be backordered)

ISBN: 978-1-955239-40-0
Categories Chapbooks, Nomadic, Poetry

Vuelta

Publication Date: February 2023

Description

In June of 2023, Black Lawrence Press welcomed numerous existing and forthcoming Nomadic Press titles to our catalogue. The Move was originally published by Nomadic Press.

Vuelta is a long poem on a quest to recover the body through myth & memory, a reckoning with colonization & the return to our Pachamama. Vuelta to revolt, to return, to revoltijo, to revolución, to transform. It is a journey of tongue & breath that asks What’s life through the mouth of the queer brown cuerpo. Vuelta insists that our bodies are a walking love language miraculously unearthing the beginning & the collapse of time where we allow ourselves to begin again in the same way the monarch continues her journey evolving over & over again.

Praise

Lourdes Figueroa’s Vuelta is full of incandescent writing that burns the vapor off words, leaving only what is essential behind. Here we read of queer love and desire, of coming of age, and of migration, both as a global phenomenon demonstrated by the figure of the monarch butterfly and as the far more personal, localized story of a Mexican girl in Idaho re/claiming American identity through, among other things, a fascination with baseball. Language, too, becomes part of the story, in the sense of both bilingual existence and the power of saying to break the fourth wall. As Figueroa writes, “but we all did it / as we proved / poetry to each other / the verb collapsing / into nothing / & everything / shining / like a mirage.”
—Jenny Drai

About the Author

Lourdes Figueroa

Lourdes Figueroa is an oral poet. Her poems are a dialogue of her lived experience when her family worked in el azadón in Yolo County. The words el azadón are used by the ones who work in the fields - the work of tilling the soil under the blistering sun. She is the author of the chapbooks yolotl and Ruidos = To Learn Speak, completed during her Alley Cat Books Residency. She received her MFA in Poetry at the University of San Francisco. She is a recipient of the 2021 Nomadic Press Literary Award in Poetry selected by emeritus poet Laureate Kim Shuck. She works and lives in Oakland with her wife, filmmaker, Peggy Peralta. Together in July of 2020 they launched Bilbil Projects, a space where poem & film come together. Lourdes is a native of limbo nation. Lourdes continues to believe in your lung and your throat.

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