Tag Latinx Poetry

new poem up at Split This Rock!

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

I’m excited to share that I have a new poem published! Check out “Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” which is currently featured as part of Split This Rock‘s Poem of the Week series. It’s always meaningful to see my work find a home, and I’m grateful to everyone at Split This Rock for featuring this poem. This poem will also be included in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, which, for those unfamiliar, is an amazing resource for general readers and educators alike.

“Every S In This Poem is Telling On Me” is a poem that comes out of my history with speech therapy as a child. The first draft came from a writing exercise I did alongside my students in the poetry workshop I taught last year. The exercise in question is Rita Dove’s “Ten-Minute Spill” from The Practice of Poetry.

Here’s the prompt for those interested in such things 🙂

Guidelines: Write a ten-line poem. The poem must include a proverb, adage, or familiar phrase (examples: she’s a brick house, between the devil and the deep blue sea, one foot in the grave, a stitch in time saves nine, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, once in a blue moon, the whole nine yards, a needle in a haystack) that you have changed in some way, as well as 2-3 words from the ones listed here: cliff, blackberry, needle, cloud, voice, mother, whir, lick, tank, terms, note, blade, tap, inquiry, reconcile, reproduce.

Writing this poem had me looking up the elementary school where it happened and only then realizing that it was named with my father’s initials. Go figure.

Thank you for reading and for your support!

= José =

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.