Lourdes Figueroa : Process Note #25

The 'process notes' 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 by Lourdes Figueroa is part of her curriculum for her class at the University of San Francisco in their MFA in Writing Program.

 

 

Process Note by Lourdes Figueroa for the Chapbook Vuelta-to revolt, to return, to revoltijo, to revolución, to transform.

 

                                                              *

Process note as lung to throat/ to tongue to spit/to river currents to poem/ as an inclination toward the overwhelming quest of what the gut wants/ a cascade of thought/ as if we are/ the rio/ & the rio ends & begins her mouth at the mouth of the ocean

                                                              how was it? that we were seeking the prodigal language?
                                                              as soon as the wet of the mouth became text
                                                              where exactly did the mystery begin?

in 2020 right before the pandemic became a pandemic I began writing in pieces
fragments at a time in the same way my mind seems
to fumble with the memory of world entering me these days

whenever I could jot down a note or two I would
I had started to lose motivation for my committed writing hours

I found find myself walking Polk Street all the way to her end/ to the ocean/ over and over again/witnessing a world shut down & become an unveiling of sorts/ things got more & more quiet — it seemed apocalyptic — in my world

& I say my world bc the world had already been ending somewhere else
so I would linger with what was ruminating in my intestines as I went up
down the street passing the Tenderloin passing Nob Hill trying to language it/ some way

only to find myself in memories of hot summers of la pisca or an empty
I would get home only to be able to read a line or a stanza of a poem
from whomever poet was in my heart that day

I would mumble & murmur to myself up & down the street or while washing dishes or looking at the bamboo moving with the breeze outside my apartment window watching day become night & night become day

I did this over & over again day after day sometimes I couldn't even conjure text
the memory of alfalfa in my nostrils

there would be a lump in my throat/ thinking of my mother working all shifts at the clinic in Woodland/all the un named brown & black bodies piling around you & I

& sometimes there would be nothing/nothing in me or in us

                                                              & George Floyd was a name for all un named
                                                              black bodies

then Vuelta began/after spring became summer
she began as a commitment to the poem/ the very act of being verb/ she becoming
a sort of a voluptuous garden that I was watering & eating from/ her legs wide open

the intention was to come home/to lay my head b/w her legs/ her hand on the back of my head/ her fingers deep in my hair/ my most ancient & truest form

Vuelta was a womxn where I knew I could lovingly come to/ take off my clothes for her/sit on her lap/ satisfy her & leave her be/only to day dream about the lip gloss on her lips/her soft axila smell on my body when I was away from her

I looked forward to her nightly daily at dawn in the 3am/ she was all mine/ tender verse
her lovely hips & lips/her kind miel colored eyes/she was sacred in all the ways I couldn't foretell/it was like I was bending down/picking up dirt naming her earth                                                                              asking her

                                                   ¿que somos? ¿porque es asi? ¿porque todo fue así?

why was she kissing all my horrific parts? everything I thought had decayed
                                         she nibbling at my chest                                                  

                                                   you see the poem is warm & raw
                                                   in the same way when we severed heads & turned them
                                                   toward the body so they could see themselves right before
                                                   they closed their eyes to die

& like river currents tend to do/ follow each other one after the other disappearing into one another/I would follow the sway of her torso/ the line & sound leading me to the next/ each informing the previous & what was to come next/she all the while sucking on my earlobe/ like every revolution & all the left over letters the lovers left as they walked away toward the sun set

                                                   all these love notes are all sorts of attempts toward a collective memory          

her hands are small/ a little smaller than mine/her pinky resembles mine/I wonder
how many womxn she has held
                                                   how many did it take to unravel in the erotic? how long did it take                                                       for the erotic to unravel you for you to say I love you
                                                    bc the erotic reveals the primordial mystery

the poem is deeply personal like everything else/ deeply erotic when it all begins to enter/she was all Lilith flowers w/ moist tips

                                                   for the longest time we thought we were confusing the body w/the poem                                                         but all along it was poem that new it was body
                                                   breaking the fourth wall making us all be so intimate

& as I write these notes to you/ about how Vuelta was an attempt to make the longest love poem/like the rest of godxxs verbs/ a reincarnation of all the poets over & over again/an act of remembrance when in fact el rio remembers nothing/I am realizing that this is why you are so holy/ like land sea & sky
                                                   bc you see the form of this poem began at your first attempts
                                                   to utter figuring the twist of lip & tap of tongue to form speak

& as I write this there is a loop on repeat/ it repeats itself in the same way all text that never was song & all song that was never text/ a Fibonacci of sorts I grab verse from this & that poem mostly leftovers from the fogginess of a dream that I thought I once wrote

                                                   you see the poem mumbles to herself
                                                   she is a loop that watches herself beginning at the same place
                                                   we doom & save ourselves
                                                   bc she has gone on forever

I'm big on using your own sound/ that which comes from your deepest insides/sweet sounds from our breathing chests/the communities that built our tongues — to language

I celebrate the vernacular & that which is considered imperfect 'english' or whatever  'imperfect' language it may be so long it is the colloquial/ so long as it is the we in the eye

I celebrate the spelling of a word as one hears it & speaks it/the phonetics of the lung to world to outer to inner to outer is uniquely you & also a uniquely form of 'we' (meaning all of those that taught you to put your sound into words)

these things of sweet sounds from our breathing chests demand to be read out loud
                                         & Vuelta repeats to herself

                                                              dame las vueltas de tu corazón/las voy a poner
                                                              en la plaza del pueblo para que sepamos
                                                              que el cuerpo es el pueblo/aquí la hora de amar

the poem in its most raw form is the body humping/ by that I mean the entirety of everything that has made us has brought us to this point where we have the capacity to articulate & point our mouths towards the mystery however dark or light it is — the entire cuerpo that is the cosmos — everything in us & outside of us is articulating thy self

                                                              *

on behalf of love: 
because the idea of poem reflects onto itself like the light that glistens on a spider web in an old migrant camp room at magic hour & disappears into the body of a people, it does what it does regardless of the language, asking what's this? what's life? which one is this one?
                                                                        In La Kech, I say unto you my dear beloved.

                                                              *

the thing is you turned left passed the corner where the blue casita was/ I couldn't see you once you were in the alleyway/ the street was cobblestones & the night a full moon exhaling a fog of sorts/ but I could still hear your footsteps/your high heels echoing lonely/ & suddenly the corner was curls of cigarette smoke/ but everything was a Lilith flower at that point & the night breeze was wet

                                                              *

estabamos en el fondo del mar/todo se escuchaba igual cuando estabamos adentro del utero
                                                                                  ¿te acuerdas?
I covered your skin with delicate assuming breath like the kind that fogs around like bees do
around a very sweet bloom        

                                                                       

                                                              "the poem ends as soft as it began--"
                                                                         from Langston Hughes' Weary Blues

 

 

 

Lourdes Figueroa is an oral chicanx queer 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. Lourdes has worked in the Bay Area as a family case manager serving immigrant families, domestic violence survivor advocate, housing advocate, interpreter, translator, & community organizer. She is the author of the chapbooks Ruidos = To Learn Speak, & most recent Vuelta with Nomadic Press. Lourdes is a recipient of the Nomadic Press Literary Award in Poetry selected by emeritus SF poet laureate Kim Shuck. Her poem Pieces from Yolotl was nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2022 by Quiet Lightning.

Lourdes continues to channel the poem in long form through the body. Every act of word is sacred — sacred movement— an extension from the very cosmos that continue to form our lungs, our throats, our vagus nerve. The act of poem is more ancient than we realize, it is within our very being that finally has the capacity to ask — what is this thing that asks what's this? what's life? To work with the poem is to be in the very act of reclamation that we belong to each other. Lourdes' poem wobbles alongside the axis of pachama's tongue & the solar praxis of the heart. Attempting to offer a series of revelations of a morphed transcendent love that occurs after the horrific, the brutal. Excavating from the personal— growing up in small towns in California as her family migrated from town to town to work en el azadón, Lourdes seeks to offer a mirror of love gazing back at us— remaking certain Mexican folklore entities that were used to haunt us in our youth & deities to our queer likeness. Specifically drawing from Aztec, Mayan Deities, & the song of Mesopotamian priestess Enheduanna she embraces the prodigal tongue— the deep wound it took for you to arrive.

The work is constantly in movement, it is the stink of el azadón, the queer in el azadón, the femicides worldwide, it has everything to do with the food we all eat, our madre tierra, everything to do with la x on our bodies and el nopal on our foreheads. Quite honestly it is a life in poems in constant conversation with each other. Like the descendants of the nopal, they are the ancient un/remembered human heart. What inspired her to write was and is survival. Lourdes lives and works in Oakland/Ohlone unceded tierra. A native of limbo nation, Lourdes continues to believe in your lung and your throat.

Social Media Handles & where to buy chapbook:
Purchase Vuelta @: https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781955239400/vuelta.aspx
Instagram: @lfigueroa1980
Facebook: @LourdesFigueroa
    @ Las Marimachas de LaBahia
Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/lfigueroa1980
Website: https://www.lourdesfigueroa.net

Maw Shein Win’s most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and two chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Along with Dawn Angelicca Barcelona and Mary Volmer, she is a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse, a new literary community. mawsheinwin.com

Process Note #15 : antmen pimentel mendoza : A Brief Note on Play

 

 

 

 

I wrote my debut chapbook MY BOYFRIEND APOCALYPSE playfully. I turned to play as an alternative to utter despair. It felt, at times, like the only alternative. In the introduction to my chapbook, I write of its timeliness. I do not mean timeliness in the way, for example, the spectacle of daily catastrophes of white supremacy makes a think piece on the “antiracist” board of directors or a hashtag campaign to “decolonize” non-profits is timely, but timely in the sense that I had to write something to remind me of apocalypse’s ordinariness. I needed to convince myself again that the world has always already been ending, and even more urgently, I needed to have a laugh about it. Here, I reflect on my play in a particular poem in the chapbook.

The poem “A Student Asks Me about Empirical Knowledge of the Self as a Prerequisite for Self-Love (And I Fumble the Response)” originates from a writing workshop facilitated by Luna Petra, one of the student interns I am lucky to work with. Its title is a self-effacing admission. At the workshop, Luna offered the prompt, “What would it look like to really know yourself?” In our conversation after our quick write, we discussed how necessary such knowledge might be to the possibility of falling in love with ourselves. The students share their reflections and I come up blank. It is not within my job description to know everything but I feel it: I fumble it.

I wrote nothing that day. The resulting poem came with distance. With distance came the understanding that more importantly than whether or not I had an answer to Luna’s question and whether or not I knew everything (or anything), I knew then and now that I have the capacity to play, to disappear into imagined selves.

In the tasks offered in the first week of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (a twelve-week program-in-a-book to help recover from artistic blockages), the author prompts the reader-artist to dream of imaginary lives, asking her to write a list and imagine how she would live those lives. Cameron writes, “Look over your list and select one. Then do it this week.” So I pulled my jeans on as a professional football player last week and I walk to work as a scrapbooker this week. “The point of these lives,” Cameron writes, “is to have fun in them—more fun than you might be having in this one.” In that spirit, I wrote the language in the resulting poem to wear its best philosopher drag. There is a life I imagine leading as a theorist. I have as much fun as possible in that one, spending my days continuing to ponder how to do things with words, how to do nothing by writing in close proximity to jargon, and so the poem opens: “Subject always already…”

I play games with the language of philosophy as an invitation to myself: If I dress my musings on therapy, my tenuous self-concept, and mindfulness in the language of meaning and logic, I can grant myself the permission to refuse meaning and logic. Perhaps more accurately, I write in this language (pulled straight from my ten-year-old memory of an introductory rhetorical theory course) as an irreverent way to let myself relax my need to be meaningful and my need to be logical.

I want us—myself and my reader, composing poems in concert, across the distances from one another—to play with how meaning-making happens with words: What’s a poetic line without a sentence? What if the sentence was a table? What if the leftmost column is a list of magazine genres? What if the middle row is a list of the colors of artisanal poppers bottles?

When writing MY BOYFRIEND APOCALYPSE, I thought of play as care, as a way to hold myself through the moment and back to poetry. Years out from when these poems began, I can admit to playing maybe a bit too much. I can admit moments exist in the chapbook where I hedged my bets with ambiguity in a bid for self-protection, moments when play gave me an out from saying the thing. To that slightly younger poet I was, I offer an invitation: You don’t have to write a poem that you can’t bear to speak plainly. There is a poem you can and it may be right next to it.

And yet, the younger poet I was, in turn, offers: You can play all the little games you like. You can have some fun with this poem and the one right next to it. Lighten up, babe.

A Student Asks Me about Empirical Knowledge of the Self as a Prerequisite to Self-Love (and I Fumble the Response)

1.

Subject always already falls
into sea-deep powder sky. I imagine

my mouth puckers. I would burst,
likely. Subject always already arrives

here, here, here. I wouldn’t check my notifications
as often (always already notified). Here I dress 

in organza, here in silk, here in the tendons
swimming chewy in spicy broth 

of cruelty. Across the universe
of me: a horizon, an event called mother, 

called reunion. Or, kindness and reverie in concert,
tersely skinned girl or cyborg or a library

of the storied always already forgotten.
Falling there will make me always already 

generous with walls of gold, soft touches through
toughest chats, and custard rich kisses on the neck. 

I think my iPhone has made me better
practiced at lying about what I know.

 

2.

What I always already know: I am
not lonely enough to chisel, desperate
enough to turn my back.

My therapist guides me in the work
of sending presents to my brain stem
(a universe suffering sugar, men, 

and a mediocre public transit system
for an empty presence and a logic game).
He says, “Breathe patience and generosity 

into it” and I, imagining an artichoke’s stalk
glitters from the salt I’ve just sprinkled, meditate
on being less shitty and mean to myself.

 

 

 

 

antmen pimentel mendoza (she, he) is the author of the chapbook MY BOYFRIEND APOCALYPSE (Nomadic Press, 2023). antmen is a writer, the Acting Co-Director of the Multicultural Community Center at UC Berkeley, and a student at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His poetry is published or forthcoming in Underblong, Peach Mag, A Velvet Giant, and Split Lip. Find antmen online at @antmenismagic and antmenpm.com or riding her bike in Oakland, CA.

 

 

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win's most recent poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press) and two chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series features poets and their process, She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA and teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was recently selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. mawsheinwin.com

 

Process Note #9 : James Cagney

The 'process notes' pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. These poems and process note by James Cagney was part of her curriculum for her Poetry Workshop at University of San Francisco in their MFA Program for Spring semester of 2023. https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sciences/programs/graduate/writing-mfa

 

 

One of the people whose presence is strongly felt in my second poetry collection, MARTIAN: The Saint Of Loneliness, is my friend, Sekou. His is the longest friendship I’ve had, and he died early during the pandemic from Sickle Cell, not COVID. The worst thought I’ve ever entertained is a kind of gratitude that he did not have to endure any emergency hospital visits behind Sickle Cell crises during the mandatory stay-at-home order. Much of our friendship, and in turn, a great part of his life was spent shuttling back and forth to hospitals and being under care. So common were his episodes, I learned that if we hadn’t talked on the phone in a while, I should just go directly to the hospital after work and ask if he was checked in as a patient. And no exaggeration: 8 times out of 10 he’d be there, and surprised to see me walk through the door.

For several years, I worked as an in-home care provider to my mother who was dying of an asbestos-related lung disease. I was an awful maid who gave good injections. A nurse who mopped floors and did laundry. I couldn’t drive. But I could do whatever she needed when she couldn’t do anything. I held great empathy (and exhaustion) for people victimized by their own bodies, by things beyond their control.

Sekou and I met via poetry open mics in Oakland. He was the older brother to another performer I also knew and loved. He was a poet who would often improvise stories as a way of negotiating continuous body pain. Sometimes he would attend an open mic and go straight to the hospital afterwards. Over the years, his diligence often introduced me to poetry and storytelling series that I didn’t know existed.

His life, in many ways, was lonelier than my own. If I felt trapped due to loyalty and love to my dying mother, he was trapped by his own body and its random choices. If I could sit in a crowded room of poets and feel hollow and lonely, much of his time was spent in hospital rooms assuaged by his Walkman or Smartphone or his brother or father visiting to read to him. I would visit and monologue about whatever adventures I’d been having, or listen to him talk about the stories he’d been thinking or lucid dreaming. Storytelling was a numbing agent and distraction for whatever was broiling beneath his skin.

Usually, he would be sent to what we called Pill Hill in Oakland, and the major hospital on its highest hilltop. Over my life, every relative I have had entered its sliding door and was never heard from again. I didn’t enjoy the aroma of hospitals nor visiting them any more than anyone else. I knew what it felt being there for an extended period. The noises, the temperature, the food, the smell. All of it, queasy and discomforting and lonely, lonely, lonely.

One weekend, I attended an outdoor poetry reading at Mosswood Park, next door to the hospital. It was a good event with many solid readers. After it adjourned, I walked up the hill to the hospital, unannounced. I found him as usual in a single room, bedridden beneath a huge bay window. His bed trafficked in devices and cords: phones, headsets, Game Boys. Between himself and his brother, I was a mysterious third son in their family. I knew his mother’s cheery voice in the background and knew of his legendary father, whom I’m not sure I was ever in the same room with more than twice. I came in and Sekou immediately wanted to go for a walk. Grabbing his IV pole and monitor, he slowly poured from the bed, and we did a lap around the hospital floor. I’d sit through nurse visits. I’d sit through his meals, and no matter how many hospital visits I’d make or to whom, all the food smelled the same. No wonder my father wanted to kill the ‘man’ whom he described as the Soup Making S.O.B. downstairs. I’ve sat through a couple of doctor visits and would leave after he received meds that quickly led to sleep.

When we got back to his room, he asked me to read some poems, then he would share whatever new story he’d been developing. I’d stay a couple of hours and as the sun dipped, so would I.

That visit after the poetry reading in the park was one of the last I ever made. As I got to the door, he asked me for a hug. Truth be told, I don’t remember that happening a lot. We'd leave with a handshake, a pound. Or maybe we hugged often, and I’ve lost that detail. Perhaps the last time stands out because it was the last time. I let the door go and went back to him, as he negotiated off the bed.

I have been complimented for my hugs and assume my arms safe, grounded, and healing—because for the most part that’s how I feel when hugging someone. I’ve often been asked for a second hug. I’ve often lingered in a person’s arms not wanting to be the first to let go. It’s such a simple thing, hugging. And so important. An event I like being asked for. But I’ve never been present minded enough to write about it. What does one say about hugging? What would E.E. Cummings say? Or Langston Hughes?

That night in bed he appeared ridiculously tiny, the child version of himself or as if I were seeing him from a full block away. With us embracing, I became fully present in his hospital room. It appeared sterile and metallic, glaring white with steel bars framing the bed, the window, the TV monitor, the dinner tray, the hospital machinery. He was the sole color and main object in the room, and I thought of those gorgeous and singular beta fish with their multicolored fins, like long, flowing ribbons. The water they floated in could be isopropyl alcohol for all I knew.

HUG

Both visiting days he asked for this
his prophetic eyes, body
a Catherine wheel going nova:

first, vaulting off the parallel bars of his walker

next, holy ghost dismounting the bed

a 10-point landing on the terrace
of my chest.

In the agreed upon silence of my arms

he felt fractional.
His spine floated, over-cooked
beneath his skin.

We whispered
                     as if healing
were a current
directed by harmonized wavelets
of breath.

Anyone watching might’ve expected
us to kiss
since we appeared to eclipse something.

Pulling open the door,
I turned.

How quiet and humble he looked.

Hollow,
drowsy as a toddler.

The room               glittered,

a stainless steel fish-tank.

He, a betta              crown-tailed by illness.

Seeing him              centered

floating

gulping air             

like that.

***

I seemed to remember he’d had major surgery on his hip. I can’t write confidently that he’d already had it (I think so) because I can’t justify describing someone getting out of a hospital bed without use of a hip. Is that possible? What I will say is it was a hug I remembered because within my arms, his body felt weird. Gelatinous and fractured within like he was a dropped toy. I held him but not as tightly as I usually would. And during my long walk to the elevator, then the bus stop, that hug remained within and haunted me until I wrote it out in words.

I wrote of him again in another poem in my book, MARTIAN: The Saint of Loneliness, in a poem called “During The Parade.” I committed myself to converting all my dreams into poems, but that isn’t always appropriate. The dream was vivid. The colors of the confetti, the texture of the ground. The emotion I felt. I don’t remember dreaming of him very much over the years, before or after. But that dream, I felt, deserved to be captured. Its quiet imagery wouldn’t leave me alone.

DURING THE PARADE

It was startling to see you
staring out from a touchpad
on the ground.

Your mouth’s silent cloud.
You blinked bewildered
a patient newscaster.

You appeared engaged
even as people stepped over
you, and confetti misted.

I wept, picking up the screen.
How'd you get here, I asked.
My mom dropped me off, you said.

You smiled. You wore a 1950s
fedora. You looked nice.
I scanned the crowd for your mother

but it blurred with strangers. I wondered
if she was somewhere drunk and relieved.
I held you like an empty plate.

I couldn't look in your face.
I wanted to position you
up high somewhere

so you could see everything.
But you only asked me
to hold you

****

The process of writing poems or assembling a book all seems the same. It's creatively listening, intuitively listening to one’s self, and how that self operates within the world. What that self sees, feels, experiences—and sharing that report in the barest more beautiful language available. I don’t know how to instruct one to pay attention to the voices, the impulses. Some voices can be negative, some impulses self-destructive. But the main thing is to pay attention. I could have shrugged off the dream, or dismissed hugging my friend as ‘an everyday thing’ and moved on. But everyday things often hold tremendous weight depending upon how you engage them. That’s the purpose and value of poetry, right? Acknowledging the weight of everyday things. I never expected my friend to appear so distinctly within a poem, much less my book- a book published the year after his passing.

I felt self-conscious about sharing those poems with him and his family, but eventually I did. I felt self-conscious because they’re so personal, so close. It's him and I hugging, dreaming together and me dropping a microphone between our chests so you can listen to the conversation beating between our hearts. Where and who are you in all this?

 

 

 

 

 

James Cagney’s second poetry collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness is the winner of the 2021 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His first, Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 2018. Both titles are available from Nomadic Press. For more information, please visit JamesCagneypoet.com

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win's recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn), which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. D.A. Powell wrote of it, "Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions, keepsakes. This piercing, gorgeous collection stands both inside and outside of containment: the porcelain vase of stargazer lilies is considered alongside the galley convicts, the children sleeping on the cement floors of detention cells, the nats inside their spirit houses; the spirit houses inside their storage units.…These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely, and resilient book." Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts (Manic D Press); her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Win’s Process Note Series on periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics features poets and their process. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito and often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. mawsheinwin.com