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National Poetry Month: Vickie Vértiz

About Blog Post Apr 26, 2024 by SCLSNJ Staff
National Poetry Month: Vickie Vértiz Created by Bob Helmbrecht, collection development librarian Vickie Vértiz is our contemporary poet for today. Vértiz's debut collection was "Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut," published in 2017 by the University of Arizona Press. From the publisher's description: "Vértiz's poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don't just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood." Juan Felipe Herrera, former Poet Laureate of the United States, said in a review: "A furious pace, a 1,000-degree eye, here Vértiz pours out her deep reflections, her erotic 'garage' novelette, her low- and high-rider journey into the various inferno s and paradisos. A collage of breathlessness, a nirvana incandescent set of urban and personal illuminations." "Auto/Body", published in 2023 by the University of Notre Dame Press, was Vértiz's second and most recent collection. From the publisher's description: "Raised in and near auto body shops, Vickie Vértiz remembers visiting them to elevate the family car to examine what's underneath, to see what's working and what's not. The poetry in this book is also a body shop, but instead we take our bodies, identities, desires, and see what's firing." Poet Khadijah Queen said "The fierceness in 'Auto/Body' does not relent, whether in its crisp memory-capture or in its attention to legacy, to present, to future in its constant ache and rift of loveliness and tumult." Check out a book by Vickie Vértiz today!
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