The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by José Felipe Alvergue are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Dominican University. Thank you for reading.
I call en el norte / soy del sur, published 2026 by Omnidawn, a “postnational postmemory in four sonnets” because the book touches on the mnemonic roots of diaspora and traces where they have left marks across borders. I chose the American sonnet for its loose adherence to a formal constraint, and for the turn through which a sonnet promises a sort of illumination out of complexity. But I wanted the turn, instead of a discreet moment of legibility per se, to broaden in its magnitude. To turn is to essai, to attempt, to reach out in language. The four essays of “trust,” “fear,” “anxiety,” and “miracles” are exercises within which the writing tests attachments to what can be felt, against environments and their sensible architectures. The four essays test what can remembered against what is experienced in real time. But because the postnational, diasporic subject is constantly leveraging their story in our attention economy, I wanted to broaden vision while preserving some privacy to the identities emerging from the writing. So, I write to photographs––my family’s personal archive––but let the photos remain illegible. Let them look, indirectly, out from the page. I want the turn to demonstrate the postnational as an emotional landscape, a mapped territory, and then turn its dimension––open the poetics to a territory, map the territory, turn, open.
“Sonnet” translates into “little song,” but more archaically also “little sound,” which I think of as being more material, like the small and persistent contours of mnemonic bits. Tito Rodriguez’s “Los Marcianos” plays out repeating snippets, los marcianos llegaron ya/ y llegaron bailando ricacha…” The song repeats, breaks, and repeats over the sonnets like sea spray. The Immigration Act, the “Alien and Sedition” Act, bits and soundbites rattle across the page and fall into shape, Tom Brokow proposing people don’t want “brown grandbabies,” oral archives of Kumeyaay remembering how they once walked across land now marked and divided. These form the border. Literally, they form vertical lines and stanzas staked into the page to give dimension to a horizon. A foreground, a background, and a timeline. The page becomes a script for reading the form of a place, like the Border. The Border is the place of my youth and adolescence, of the years where my nervous system felt most unsettled as a proportion of curiosity. I would come to resolve this energy through investigation. I reflect on this now, giving unrooted emotions a place to take hold. My practice of investigative, docupoetics feeds the roots with an archival mulch. Facts and truths give off sunlight. Seed, root, and bloom, these are where “little sounds” open undisclosed memories of potential traumas to sight. The archival evidence from a process of searching is meant move nerves away from the inflammatory place of my brain and into the logical, rational hallways of nerves and electricity.
My engagement with the sonnet exercises this process, as intervals of inflammation and archive, raw feeling and terminology, tender tissue and footnotes. Image, feeling, turn––place, song, turn––face, sound, turn. Moment, inflammation, turn. History, inflammation, turn. Future… And so on. This critical investigation in poetic shape is meant to free us, as diasporic people, from the bondage of inherited pain, and disclose instead the evidence that our environments are strands of a rope called colonialism. And in it, we have still loved.
The attempt is also a challenge. It’s work. It’s almost impossible to think about my process without engaging with my process. It’s almost impossible to reflect on a book that is essentially a love letter to my family, and a letter to the small speechless child who looks out from environments I busy myself making sense of, now, without feeling a new inflammation and epidemiological tax over the death of Kohen Wiley, over photos of unaccompanied children sitting in deportation hearings wearing giant headphones like futurist torture crowns.
The diasporic holding environment is, at its most nourishing, loud and exciting, full of stories and characters, unbelievable realities, and fantastical histories. At its most precarious, this environment is quiet and solipsistic, melancholic, and perhaps hyper focused on ghosts. Living in el norte, my experience is that these ghosts are very real and authorized to be violent. En el norte / soy del sur is a love letter to the community hunted by these monsters. It’s a letter to my family, resilient and unrelenting in its ability to conjure love. Love is a turn that reveals magnitude. This book is a love letter to an experience with life we risk losing the more this current historical agenda succeeds in glorifying how easily we can be erased, and how great it is for a few to own the right to be alive.
José Felipe Alvergue is the author of five books, most recently purplish: poetry anger publics (2025), an auto-theoretical reflection on politics and the record of human emotions archived in poetry, and en el norte/soy del sur (2026), a collection of sonnet essays reflecting on diaspora and wellbeing. José grew up on the Mexico-US border in South San Diego, and is a proud member of the Salvadoran diaspora.
link: jfalvergue.com
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https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/E/bo265673701.html
Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com
