“Below me, the Ocean, moss green, opaque & calm: A Conversation with Yaccaira Salvatierra about Sons of Salt”— curated by Tiffany Troy


Yaccaira Salvatierra’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, The Nation, Huizache, Narrative, Puerto del Sol, and Rattle among others. Her honors include the Dorrit Sibley Award for achievement in Poetry, a recipient of the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize, the Lucille Clifton Memorial Scholarship as a fellow at the Community of Writers Workshop, a scholarship recipient for the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, a fellow at VONA, and a recipient of a residency at Hedgebrook. She has been a finalist of various awards such as the Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets and the Lit Fest Emerging Writer Fellowship in poetry. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net. She lives in Oakland, California where she is a dedicated educator..

Sons of Salt by Yaccaira Salvatierra is vast the way the ocean, moss green, opaque & calm is vast, as the speaker dreams of the Ocean breaking the mother’s rib to make her son. No tengas miedo, the Ocean says to the mother in her dreams, and the richness of this dream is reflected in the rich variety of poetic forms with each word a dot, line, and ray, purging the speaker’s pain, fear, and grief

Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “Prologue,” set up the poems that are to follow in Son in Salt?

To me, it introduces the speaker as a mother and her addressee “Hijo mío” as her son. It inverses the biblical narrative of God breaking off Adam’s rib to make Eve, and speak instead of the Ocean: “when the Ocean imagined you, / It stretched a mighty wave, reached into my chest / & broke the strongest rib above my heart to build you.”

Yaccaira Salvatierra: Yes,“Prologue” introduces a mother who is looking for her son, which later we see happen more through other speakers in poems to come. I wanted to remythologize the biblical narrative of Adam’s rib to make Eve, not only to speak of the deep connection a mother has with her son but to question the Biblical stories I grew up with. It was important for me to focus on women raising sons when fathers are absent in a patriarchal society, not as a way to demonize them but to understand situations with compassion.

TT: I felt that deep connection with the oceanic imagery evoked in the poem and throughout your collection. Can you tell us about the process in writing and putting together Sons of Salt? And maybe also a bit about the cover art, “La Virgin, Gelatin Silver” by Delilah Montoya?

YS: In 2018, I started an MFA program at Randolph College where I was hoping to finish a project I’d been working on for a while, but an enormous challenge regarding my family presented itself affecting my ability to write, to concentrate. I was meeting with one of my mentors, and I expressed my inability to write because I no longer found  purpose in it.  It was obvious to her I had sent her poems I had written long ago: polished, perfected, not a first draft. I spoke to her about my recurring dreams, my sons, my fears and she encouraged me to not separate my writing from life, to write it all down without expectation of publication, to do it for me. That evening, I began to write those oceanic recurring dreams, pain, grief, and fear into poems.  It was as though I was purging. I kept writing, and at the end of my MFA program, I had a manuscript I was encouraged, by mentors, to polish for publication.

            About a year later,  after the project was done and picked up by BOA Editions, I was  looking for a cover photo. I reached out to my friend Maceo Montoya, artist and writer, for suggestions of Chicana or Latina photographers. Delilah Montaya (no relation to Maceo) was a photographer he suggested. I looked through her work and thought this photo was emblematic of one of the principal themes: a woman turning her back on a religion that continues–in my opinion–to subjugate women and negatively affect our boys and how they live in our society.

TT: I love the backstory of the cover image and how you center the speaker’s questionings and wonder if you could tell us next about the structure that you ultimately landed on in the collection, which is begins with “Volcanoes” and alternates between “Volcanoes” and other section titles, before landing on “In the Distance” and “Ocean.”

How do you think the poems themselves evoke your nightmares/ dreams of your family at the time or even now?

YS:  The visual structures helped me move away from the grief I was deep in while writing these poems, they helped me stay in a creative space of excitement. I chose the square or quadrilateral thinking of a container, of what it holds, what needs to break free. It became the shape I wanted to play with, obsess over, find metaphors for.  In this case, I wanted the square to break open for my dreams, away from my fears, an opening my sons could walk out of and away from my side, break free from the religious holds from my upbringing, and from myself into a place of possibility. I was influenced by Terrance Hayes book, Wind in a Box, and how the theme of what is contained in “box” when thinking of freedom, or the wind, was wonderfully threaded through the book. I wanted to create a thread and cohesiveness, a beginning and an end. Again, the visual and metaphorical idea of a box helped me with this from the beginning all the way into the last section.

In terms of my dreams, I reflected on them quite a bit, which became a place of respite, a place to escape, or a place of guidance. I sought images as messages or answers to challenges in waking life. Also, during this time, I was having dreams with bodies of water–mostly the ocean. I don’t think this was accidental. There was one particular dream, which didn’t make it into the book, where I found myself on a beach with other people enjoying the tranquility. Suddenly, a high tide forced us to run off the beach in search of higher ground, and, with the high tide, innumerous large kelp. All of the sudden the entire beach was covered in kelp. As the waves came in, so did the kelp, and like arms, they grabbed onto our feet. I was quick and nimble enough to reach higher ground, but when I turned around, others were stuck trying to set themselves free from kelp. As more waves came and went, more kelp covered the shore. One of them was one of my sons who was desperately trying to free himself. I was about to run back to help, but the ocean, or God, or a spirit instructed me to stay back and let my son set himself free on his own, to trust his ability. Before I could see if he had triumphed, I woke up with a feeling of relief and unwavering faith.

What’s interesting about this particular dream is, even though I’ve seen small amounts of kelp on a beach, I’ve never seen massive amounts of it on a shore. So, when my book came out, I wanted to celebrate by doing something in the ocean, something I had not done before, something uncomfortable, fearful. I wanted to surf. My partner, who is a surfer, took me out to a cove in Santa Cruz. To my disbelief, the shore was filled with kelp, and–to swim out into the ocean–one had to swim above a dense kelp forest. It was exactly what I saw in my dream!

I think poems are like dreams. They evoke answers. They are prayers. They are places of emotions where one can be free to be. In terms of dreams–as I do for some poems–I meditate before I go to bed, pray for guidance, and then hope or trust guidance will come through. I acknowledge this practice isn’t anything new: many cultures, for years and years before us, have looked to the power in dreams.

TT: I also would like to turn to the structure of your collection: there is so much play with form. For aspiring poets, what are tips you can give them in terms of how to evoke claustrophobia, reflection and/or refraction through the different forms that your poems take?

YS: I enjoy forms across traditional forms, western and nonwestern. They’re like puzzles, but I’m also fascinated by the blank page as a canvas, especially when thinking of different “forms” and how they can move across the entire page. It’s fun to think how it can inform the poem and its subjects or moods. I believe most anything can be an inspiration of a form. One thing I would say is to look to the world around us, for inspiration. For example, something as common as a tree can take the shape of a form. I’m not saying the poem should take the form of a tree but rather looking at lines, length, repetitions, or the movement of the poem like the elements of a tree. I would ask myself: How can a tree hold a poetic form? What part of the poem can be like roots? How many lines and how long can they be? What about the branches? It’s leaves? What is the emotion? The mood? How does wind moving through a tree change the way one might write a poem? What about storms? A breeze?  A blank page is the perfect place for new ways of thinking and creating forms. I’d be curious to see what new forms students come up with when given the freedom to make new forms inspired by what we see off the page.

TT: Who are some poets that inspire you, especially in thinking through and about nontraditional forms, as a kind of opening that also at the same time structures and informs the poem(s)?

YS: Yes, there are many poets. Off the top of my head I think of Terrance Hayes, Layli Long Soldier, Cecilia Vicuña and Raúl Zurita especially in rethinking “poetic traditions” and how, globally, there are many non eurocentric traditions in languages other than Eurocentric languages. Still, Terrance Hayes’s work pushes me to learn Western forms, to break and reshape them, and to bring them closer to my cultural experience, a bridge to my Mexican and Peruvian families and histories while living in the United States.  When I think of Layli Long Soldier’s work, I think about “forms” that have existed outside of Euro-Western traditional forms. I appreciate the visual qualities of her work different from other work I’ve seen. Her work also makes me think of language and history and how I can use the page to capture both while using the languages I grew up with, first Spanish, then English. My father and Peruvian family–many of his generation–speak Quechua, an indigenous language spoken in Perú, a language I was not taught. Because of this fact, because of what I have lost and what I can gain by reimagining my family and place and how to see the world attached to language, what I can reclaim, I can reimagine a poem on a page.

Cecilia Vicuña’s work inspires me to use the page like one does with visual art, to create poems visually as new images, which is another way to translate/interpret the human experience. Raúl Zurita’s work inspires me to think outside the confines of a page. He has used his poetry off the page and placed his words–literally–in the sky with plane smoke, or under structures over shores. I wonder how I can do that, capture that new feeling on the page or off.

TT: I can definitely see the influences in your “visual poems,” in thinking about the space of the page as a nexus of thought, with words as entities that occupy space (as dots, rays, and shapes) and the gradation of spaces (white space, gray space, boxed space, scattered space, etc.) Translation to me feels like a big part of your project. How do you decide what to translate from Spanish into English, gloss for the English-speaking reader versus leave in the original Spanish? For instance, speech is often left in Spanish and I felt that in those instances. it adds to the texture and pathos of your collection.

YS: Thank you for noticing that. It was obvious for me to use language the way it has shown up in my life. It felt natural. I live in many worlds, and some of them are based around languages. I used it mostly in dialogue. Even in my dreams, where the ocean speaks in Spanish, like in the phrase No tengas miedo. I use Spanish because it is how I heard it.

TT: In closing, do you have any tips or thoughts for your readers of the world?

YS: Read an array of experiences–listen to them–especially if an experience is different to one’s own, because I have learned that people–overall–want to be heard; their pain and their joy, acknowledged for understanding, for connection, which to me is synonymous to love. 

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.