I first met Ruben Quesada at a local bar in Chicago called the The Innertown Pub where we were reading for a fundraising event curated by The Poetry Center of Chicago. Not only was I struck by his genuine niceness, I was entranced by his poems—they were quietly […]
We’re stopped in Subiaco to lay stones on stone at a fellow penner’s grave where we jaw, punch-drunk and carsick, about being buried or burned up. “I don’t want to take up any more space,” […]
Isn’t it clear? I am writing about this house and its property because I want you to be here to see that what I saw in the way you fed ducks at Holmdel Park became me, finally, before winded years, that you can meet my wife, give us over dinner […]
Tyler Meier’s “July” follows the Biblical advice to “consider the lilies, how they grow.” But Meier’s flowers do more than “neither toil nor spin”: they author the biography of summer, which, much as a “season’s persistence” leads to its passing, implies that the month’s life story is already […]
Summer’s biographers: two lilies. Their orange a document of the season’s persistence, their necks a slender new alphabet for everything I’ve ever loved. Sky the color of a nervous horse. What the fly does to the shadow is for the shadow alone, even though the always-light keeps pressing […]
Download the PDF file . Ruben Quesada (PhD, MFA) teaches creative writing and Latinx Literature in Chicago. His writing can be found in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. @rubenquesada on Twitter.
I am ashamed to say that I discovered Limón’s work late, after she had already been a finalist for some major prizes, after her third book was well-known among friends and peers; this sometimes happens even to the most diligent writer, and so, in an effort to save […]
Download the PDF file . Ruben Quesada (PhD, MFA) teaches creative writing and Latinx Literature in Chicago. His writing can be found in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. @rubenquesada on Twitter.
The first time I read a poem by Paige Lewis, I was captivated by their voice—particularly its ability to carry a reader through jarring, surreal images with absolute clarity. Strange things often happen to time, space, and the body in Lewis’s poems, so their direct, accessible voice becomes […]
Download the PDF file . Ruben Quesada (PhD, MFA) teaches creative writing and Latinx Literature in Chicago. His writing can be found in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. @rubenquesada on Twitter.