Category writer feature

writer feature: Amanda Galvan Huynh

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

This week I’d like to celebrate the debut poetry collection of stellar poet and friend, Amanda Galvan Huynh: Where My Umbilical Is Buried (Sundress Publications).

I’ve admired Galvan Huynh’s work on and off the page for some time now. She’s a committed Xicana educator as well as an editor, alongside Luisa A. Igloria, of the essay collection Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making :: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics.

I had a chance to read the collection and provide a blurb. Here’s what I wrote:

“From the title, Where My Umbilical Is Buried, Amanda Galvan Huynh invites readers to engage with the metaphor and image rich sensibility that drive the poems within. From the roads, nights, and fields where memory lies ‘buried’ under the sounds of voices whispering, Coke tab bracelets jangling, and cumbias, these poems grow and flourish into a lyric gift, an expression of affirmation and presence for gente y familia—the living, the dead, as well as who we must be in between.”

—José Angel Araguz, author of Rotura

To get a sense of the dynamic range of the collection, check out these two poems published originally in Up the Staircase.

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Copies of Where My Umbilical is Buried can be purchased from Sundress Publications.

To read more of Amanda Galvan Huynh, check out her website.

writer feature: Laura Cesarco Eglin

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

Just a quick post to celebrate the publication of Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254) by Laura Cesarco Eglin.

Book cover for Time/Tempo by Laura Cesarco Eglin.

I had a chance to spend time with this collection pre-publication. Here’s the blurb I wrote:

Laura Cesarco Eglin’s Time/Tempo is a meditation on time unlike any other. Where time is often viewed as a limited resource, a reminder of our mortality and an immovable structure in our lives inevitably to be reckoned with, Eglin’s poems invite us into a deeper contemplation where one is asked to consider “What is left of me after I’ve left a place, after it has left me.” This visceral logic and sensibility make of time not only a companion but a dimension of self, and it is here where these poems most speak to the human experience. Eglin joins Emily Dickinson and Octavio Paz in her pursuit and engagement with what can be learned from the space between the ephemeral and everlasting. –José Angel Araguz, Ph.D., author of Rotura (Black Lawrence Press)

The poem below, “Learning Time,” embodies a number of the qualities I point out here. The poem starts off with a simple enough admission. The voice, however, continues building off the initial observation, eventually developing a meditation whose sense of intimacy lies somewhere between philosophy and diary. The result is a poem whose turns and logic feel both urgent and personal.

The ending of this poem is one of my favorite moments in the book. Cutting off mid-sentence on the word “Clouds” creates a jolt in the momentum of the poem which evokes the feeling the speaker has been lyricizing around. It is a moment at once tongue-in-cheek but also visceral, showing that humor and insight are born of the same material.

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Laura Cesarco Eglin

Learning Time

It rained yesterday and I missed it.

What happens simultaneously doesn’t
wait for witnesses and grows
in the air to then come down,
touch the trees at varying speeds
and leave the summer green a few
moments removed. That’s how
it rains again. Rain’s repeated, rain
is multiple and plural in its singularity.

Puddles in the parking lot say
there was a different picture moving
its way through a before. Clouds

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Copies of Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath by Laura Cesarco Eglin can be purchased from PRESS 254.

Be sure to check out this microreview & interview of one of Eglin’s earlier publications.

To learn more about Eglin’s work, check out her website.