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Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

The Border’s Bright Dead Things: On Ada Limón’s Embodied Poetics

Late in June 2019, like many others worldwide, I viewed, aghast, the photograph of the drowned bodies of 26-year-old Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria….

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

Black Latina Girlhood Poetics of the Body: Church, Sexuality and Dispossession

Like Xiomara, the teenage protagonist of Elizabeth Acevedo’s poetry novel The Poet X, I was always afraid of getting disciplina — of getting caught up and revealed as an imposter…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

Slow Encounter

I Natalie Diaz writes, “In my Mojave culture, many of our songs are maps.” Diaz does not mean this in the sense of a settler colonial map. They do not…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

Poetry, Pulse, and the Anthology

It has been over three years since forty-nine people were murdered at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Public attention has waned. But for certain communities, it is impossible…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

Afro-Boricua Archives: Paperless People and Photo/Poetics as Resistance

In her monograph, Boricua Literature, Lisa Sánchez González argues that in the face of national, colonial, and institutional erasure, Boricuas — the Taíno-derived demonym for Puerto Ricans — find themselves…

Contemporaries Essays, The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

The Body of Contemporary Latina/o/x Poetry

Among scholars and teachers of Latina/o/x literature, it has become commonplace in recent years to speak about the vitality of poetry, which has long been subordinated to narrative in research…

Issue 4: Political Reaction and the Politics of Slapstick, Peer Reviewed Articles

Writers for Goldwater

In Political Fictions (2001), Joan Didion insists that her politics are not “eccentric, opaque, somehow unreadable.” She writes: They are the logical product of a childhood largely spent among conservative…

Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object

Trace Alignment: Object Relations after Ana Mendieta

A Palimpsest of Returns In July 2017, I accompanied twelve students from Oregon State University to Cuba on a study abroad trip. It was also my first trip to Cuba,…

Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object

Feeling Like a Bad Trans Object

Being trans in a cis culture means that too many first encounters with oneself come through the shame of exposure. I remember being called gay by kids so many times…

Contemporaries Essays, Someone Else's Object

Tasting Embarrassment, or, Liking Leo

I want to embark on a self-conscious exploration of encountering white stardom. To my mind, the white star is objectified as someone else and for someone else, and yet, through…