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some highlights, 2023

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

I am happy to report that I continue to have a hundred percent survival rate. This is a phrase I’ve picked up from my therapist. It shook me the first time she said it. The acknowledgment of still being here despite the struggles and setbacks over the years hit like a punch in the gut. That still being here is an accomplishment, something to build on, not just the frayed edges of just enough.

Here’s to keeping that up, all of us.

As the year wraps up, here are some things I’m proud to have produced or helped produce from the year:

First and foremost, I am proud to have my lyric memoir, Ruin & Want (Sundress Publications), out in the world! Thank you to everyone who has gotten a copy and spent time with it. I appreciate all the kind words folks have shared.

It was a hard project to get out, but a necessary one (I spoke at length of what this project entailed in an interview with Sundress Publications).

This book is a testament to that hundred percent survival rate that I spoke of above. More than anything I hope it helps people.

Also, I am honored to have helped bring into the world this powerful e-chapbook by Maria S. Picone, Water Gwisin Saves the Earth. Picone was selected as the 2023 Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award winner over at Salamander. Such a great poet, such a great collection of poems. I encourage folks to check it out.

I am also happy to be serving on the Advisory Editorial Board over at Swing who put out their first issue this year! Proud to see them put together a dynamic issue!

Lastly, I am happy to have published a review of Dream of Xibalba by Stephanie Adams-Santos over at Lambda Literary Review. This book invites an open approach with one’s own lyric sensibility. Surprise that a book about the Mayan underworld is a trip.

Biggest highlight is still being alive.

Hope folks are staying safe out there!

Abrazos,

José

Ruin & Want interview excerpts, final part

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Here’s the final excerpt from my Sundress Publications interview with Izzy Astuto. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read some of these. Had one friend refer to them as part craft talk which means so much. These words, in the book, on slides, here between us, matter so much. 

Thanks to those of you who have pre-ordered Ruin & Want and who are considering doing so and/or requesting the book at your public library!

Izzy Astuto: Some final questions, specifically about the close of the book: Why did you name the last section “epilogue,” rather than an eighth chapter? Also, how did you decide to end the book with another poet’s words? In this case, with Yeats? , Sundress Publications

José: In regard to the “epilogue,” I wanted to mark a shift in tone and perspective, that the narrative whirlwind was dying down and some sense of closure for the reader (if not the speaker) was in sight. Also, I feel like the I in this section is more assertive, doing the work to make clear connections across narratives, less of letting the reader do the work.

As for the ending image and words, I have Samantha Edmonds (Associate Prose Editor at Sundress Publications) to thank for that ending. In some of the later drafts, the epilogue section was a little too on the nose, a lot of underscoring my intentions in the book rather than letting them ring and resonate. When she pointed out the image in the Yeats reference as a possible ending, it felt right. The Yeats poem is central to the manuscript and the experience. 

There’s also that quote about all of us being in the gutter only some of us are looking at the stars—there’s some of that in that last line. Also the feeling that the reading experience of this book is a “blur” of memory and narrative that leaves us looking at the “stars.” That starts are things romanticized but also, as the devil tells us in the book, they are things that are “dead inside” as well. That mix of darkness and light, hope and nihilism, pues, that’s where I live.

More Ruin-related content soon 🙂

José