Poem of the Week | January 02, 2017
Analicia Sotelo: "South Texas Persephone"
This week, we are proud to present a new poem by Analicia Sotelo. Sotelo earned her MFA from the University of Houston. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Best New Poets 2015, The Antioch Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Collagist, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Nonstop Godhead, was recently selected by Rigoberto González for the Poetry Society of America’s 2016 Chapbook Fellowship. Sotelo has received scholarships from Squaw Valley and Image Text Ithaca, and is the 2016 Disquiet International Literary Prize winner in Poetry. She currently lives in Houston, TX.
Author’s note:
Though I grew up in South Texas, my grandparents had a ranch in West Texas that I frequently visited. This poem takes a good amount of visual notes from those landscapes. The mood of the country—spare, brush, wild—is something I can’t forget, and I wanted to give this poem the epic feeling it gave me back then. I was also interested in a Persephone who lives in a hot, dry place—a place without seasons. How curious would she be about a colder way of life?
South Texas Persephone
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