Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrants: A Spanish father and Irish mother. Her second book This Tangled Body was published in 2024 by FlowerSong Press/Letras Latinas. Her first book In the Company of Spirits (Press 53, 2012) was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. Calatayud’s poetry has appeared or is upcoming in journals such as Anti-Heroin Chic, Poet Lore, POETRY Magazine, Rogue Agent and Tahoma Literary Journal. She is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner, a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, and serves on the editorial staff of The Skinny Poetry Journal.
As writers, it can be difficult to express grief so openly on the page, to relive what we experienced in a register that is relatable to readers who might not have stared down the path we have traveled. Poetry no doubt suffers from the public perception that it is “sad” and “depressing,” that it brings out the most emotional aspects of us even for the most trivial of moments. But writing about loss, displacement, and longing in a manner that renders the personal universal, and that doesn’t trivialize the real pain that has been lived and remembered, is anything but cliché. Rather, it’s a testament to the courage one has in facing such obstacles head on, regardless of what the view from the sidelines might be. For Carmen Calatayud’s This Tangled Body (FlowerSong Press 2024), readers come to understand that confronting grief is the surest way to arrive at a greater and more sustainable truth, one that doesn’t shy away from both the most painful memories and the most unforgettable triumphs.
Carmen, thank you so much for your time. This Tangled Body is an incredible collection of poems centered on confronting the past and working through the grief that resurfaces in the present. Writing about loss, death, displacement, and addiction is not always easy, but you do so with empathy and an open mindedness to remedy the hard truths that sometimes resist being revealed. How did poetry become a medium for you to harness and confront grief? How did it manifest in this collection?
Carmen Calatayud: Esteban, I appreciate your kind words, and it’s great to be in conversation with you. I have to tell you that your book Lotería was one of the poetry books I was reading for inspiration as I was writing this book.
Poetry found me at a young age, and I loved rhyme, rhythm and language. Music was the same, and listening to the radio and hearing song lyrics had a similar effect. Reading books, writing poetry and listening to music made up a subterranean world where I could steep in the imaginative realms and find safety from a chaotic household. It wasn’t until my 20s that I discovered modern and contemporary poetry that told the kind of truths I was holding on to and had been writing about—poets such as Audre Lorde, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo and Lorna Dee Cervantes. That there was a place for social justice, mental health, addiction, chronic illness and grief in poetry, written by women, was a relief and a huge inspiration for me.
Most of the poems in this collection were written between 2020 and 2023, and those years brought a lot of losses, including my mother, who died from COVID early in the pandemic. There were five more deaths during 2020 and 2021. Grief manifesting in this collection was unavoidable for me. In the midst of those losses, I went through a divorce and moved across the country. I was experiencing hip pain so severe that I could barely walk at times, and finally I was diagnosed with hip dysplasia. While I was writing and editing this book I had two surgeries: A left hip replacement in August 2023 and a right hip replacement in November 2023.
Writing about grief is a way of engaging in communal grief. That included writing about war, addiction and the body in this collection, which was the medicine I needed. With the rapid succession of losses I experienced, losses from the past re-emerged and made their way into these poems as well. Grief unfolds in layers throughout our lives and changes us. I’ve learned to accept and make space for the layers. Avoiding grief can do a lot of damage to us individually and collectively.
Esteban Rodríguez: If someone were to ask me to sum up This Tangled Body, I would give them the following lines from “Refugee Couple”:
We lived through separate wars
but spoke the same language of dread.
I don’t know peace but I know
how to speak under my breath.
How to make noise
in the brief times of safety.
In the crux of the ruptured world.
How do you go about “making noise” (bringing past injustices to light and calling attention to current inequalities) in a world that increasingly seeks to drown out anything that isn’t a part of the status quo?
CC: Writing poetry is making noise, and reading poetry out loud is making a bigger noise, yes? I can’t get away from writing about past or current injustices because they are part of our collective history. We know from epigenetic research that we carry the imprints of trauma in our DNA, and experience trauma responses such as anxiety, even if we didn’t experience or witness an event.
I write about war and social justice because I was aware of war, prejudice and inequality from a young age. My father sat us down in the late 60s and told us, after his close friend was killed in Vietnam, that if he got called to war, we would leave the country. I’m not sure if he had a concrete plan, and I didn’t realize that he had survived the Spanish Civil War as a child, or that my Irish mother had survived World War II in London.
The book speaks to topics that are still considered taboo by some and may go against the status quo, as you mentioned, including addiction, violence, sex and the body. There are poems about four major concussions I’ve had that I never imagined writing. The concussion poems only exist because my editor jo reyes-boitel pushed me to write them.
ER: How has poetry helped you achieve speaking about the truth?
CC: When it comes to speaking the truth, poetry has a certain power, an ancient one, that other genres don’t capture the same way. Anything I might have achieved in speaking the truth was inspired by the great poets I read–they are all my teachers–and also came about in community.
One poet who infused me with inspiration to keep speaking the truth through poetry was Francisco X. Alarcón, who I connected with in April 2010 soon after Arizona passed its racial profiling law SB 1070 to target the Latinx community. Francisco invited me to join his Poets Responding to SB 1070 movement as a poet moderator for his Facebook group, and six of us moderators worked together for more than five years. We dedicated ourselves to posting news about Arizona SB 1070 and other human rights news on the Facebook page daily, where we had thousands of readers. Each week we selected poems from the numerous submissions we received on Facebook, and featured them on our page and at La Bloga’s “Online Floricanto” with the help of La Bloga editor Michael Sedano.
We sponsored readings and events around the country, attended marches, gave presentations at AWP and Split This Rock, and shared our poems wherever we could, educating people along the way. The tragic loss of Francisco in January 2016 changed everything for so many of us. My book includes a poem dedicated to Francisco.
When I think of speaking about the truth through poetry, I think about Nikky Finney, who said it directly: “My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away.”
ER: Thank you for your thorough explanation of how you came to write about these themes and experiences. I think it’s safe to say that the cover art for your collection encapsulates all of this and more, and I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about that beautifully haunting painting of a woman disembodied from herself. Can you speak about this artwork and how you came to choose it for your book?
CC: I was at a gathering of poets here in San Antonio in the summer of 2022, and ire’ne lara silva had the brilliant idea of picking out cover art for books we wanted to write as a way to keep us moving forward. I immediately went to the website of Chicanx artist Aydee Lopez Martinez, whose painting “In the Company of Great Spirits” is on the cover of my first book. I was stunned to find this painting “Out There, Someday, Maybe I’ll Have it All Together,” which captured what I knew the book’s themes would be, as well as the title This Tangled Body. Aydee’s work has been shown across the U.S. and Mexico, and I’m grateful she once again allowed me to use her powerful, evocative art.
ER: Dreams, whether the narrator is experiencing them or contemplating their meaning, continuously emerged in This Tangled Body. As a young writer, I was told that writing about dreams was off topic, that I had to write about more serious matters. But I quickly found that the whole purpose of writing was to write about everything, dreams included. You do it so well in your collection, and I wanted to know how dreams made their way into these poems?
Also, what kind of dreams influence your writing?
CC: There are the dreams that I capture when I wake up, and then there is the dream state I enter during the day......thoughts and body sensations that tell me there’s something or someone else present. In the book I have dream poems about my father and my mother, both of whom are dead. Those poems arose from daydreams about them and the need to tell a slice of their stories. The prose piece in the book, “Boy With No Name,” opens with an actual dream I had when I was in a difficult relationship, and the dream turned out to be a forewarning. I wrote down the quote I heard in that dream: “I know this is the winter of your discontent. I have not forsaken you.” It was a strange combination of Shakespeare and Jesus, neither of whom I felt connected to, and I carried that quote in my wallet for years as a reminder that I hadn’t been abandoned. Even now, that quote reminds me that dreams can come from the spirit world and that my ancestors are with me, protecting me.
Almost any kind of dream or dream snippet can influence my writing. Something I love about poetry is that it’s often dream like: A flash or a written photograph of time that offers deeper understanding. Dreams are personal and collective—they are the entry point. Doesn’t everything we need or want begin as a dream, a vision? A child has a dream of walking as they crawl, stumble and try again until they get it right. We all began as a dream before we existed. We were dreamed into existence. Poems can be dreamed into existence.
ER: I love how you mention that in your dream you heard this pretty profound quote that sounded like a combination of Shakespeare and Jesus. This got me thinking of this one time when I swore I heard a student of mine sigh to himself the words, “Every kingdom hurts.” This was just after a lesson on metaphors, and while I don’t know if he was intentionally practicing his literary skills himself, since I never followed up, I did keep those words with me for a long time. I even started writing poems centered around the idea of “kingdoms” letting people down.
What unintentional influences have affected your writing? And what influences (poetry, art, etc.) do you turn to to inspire your work?
CC: “Every kingdom hurts.” Brilliant insight. Kingdoms are families, schools, workplaces, organizations, institutions—including the “institution” of marriage. That sounds like quite a series of poems you have on hand.
Unintentional influences: I record voice memos of lines, ideas or bits of conversation I overhear. Just two nights ago, I listened to some old voice memos and discovered a gem. As a therapist, I walk past the reception area a lot. A few months ago, I heard someone say to the receptionist, “This planet earth is a strange place, but someday I’ll be going home.” I ran back to my office and recorded the line in a voice memo. I haven’t used this as a writing prompt or a line yet, I want to use it somehow.
Several of the poems in this collection have celestial references, but this person’s line speaks to another theme that resonates for me: Not belonging and the search for home. Without intending to, some poems speak to an old feeling that I don’t belong, due to being the child of immigrants, how people reacted to my parents, and questioning whether I belong in or to this country. The sense that I must be from outer space because I’m not from here.
What I turn to for inspiration includes work by other poets and writers. I mentioned a few of the writers who have been important to me earlier, and can add that one poet I admire and return to is Cynthia Cruz. For this book specifically, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos was a big influence. Febos brings together memoir and history about how women, BIPOC and queer people have been shut out of publishing, repeatedly being told by white patriarchy that we aren’t allowed to write about our bodies or the trauma we’ve experienced. She makes the case, powerfully, that our stories of trauma, addiction, recovery, healing and life in a body that has been othered or objectified are important and belong in the world.
When it comes to art, the painters Patssi Valdez and Remedios Varo, and the photographers Graciela Iturbide and Diane Arbus, come to mind. Mysticism is also an influence: I’ve been steeped in studying astrology, intuition and the dream world for decades, and what lies beyond the veil is a daily influence. The ocean, the desert and the sky are inspirational homes I return to in my being and in my writing.
ER: What plans do you have for the next book? Where do you begin after having written such a beautiful, unapologetic, and fierce collection?
CC: I’ve been writing poems, and I have some nonfiction pieces I’d like to spend time with. The deeper answer is that I’m still processing all that unfolded during the last four years, including writing this book. The book wouldn’t exist without the inspiration of Francisco Aragón, the director of Letras Latinas at the University of Notre Dame, who reached out to me when I was in physical pain and wasn’t sure what was next in my medical journey. His encouragement got me back to writing the manuscript in a serious way. Letras Latinas generously supported FlowerSong Press to make the publication of this book possible.
While I don’t have a concrete plan yet for the next book, it may offer more of a spiritual emphasis, which my first book In the Company of Spirits did. After many years of connection on Facebook, I finally met Denise Chávez here in San Antonio when she did a reading for her new book Street of Too Many Stories, published by Conocimientos Press. The passages she read were filled with spirituality and magical realism. When I sat with her to ask her about her own spirituality and her writing, she looked into my eyes and said, “You have to talk to the dead every day. You have to talk to the dead every day.”
The next morning, I went into my closet and opened a box with my parents’ original passports. When I opened my father’s passport from España, a piece of paper dropped out that I never saw before. It had the full names of my grandparents–paternal and maternal. Now that piece of paper is on my altar and I’m talking to them more than I ever have. I don’t know where that will lead, but I hope it has more to offer my soul and my writing.
ER: This is a variation of questions that I’ve heard on various podcasts and read in different interviews, but I think it’s good to know how others view the world through that art that is produced. So, what is one book, one album, and one film that you would recommend?
CC: Such an impossible question, Esteban, but I’ll stick to new releases for the book and album recommendations, as they deserve notice, and an older one for film.
When it comes to poetry, I highly recommend The Stuff of Hollywood (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), the new collection by Niki Herd. This is poetry that takes on American gun culture, police brutality, race, and the politics that feeds it all. Herd uses mass shootings, murders by police, and politician appearances from the headlines. She then turns them into poetic documents that act as a mirror between American violence and the movie industry, with some poems using a screenwriting approach. The poetry is stark and inventive, and Herd is the poetic journalist we’ve been waiting for. This book should be required reading for any poet or writer who cares about these issues and how they shape life in the U.S.
When it comes to albums, I recommend Paloma, the new traditional Mexican music EP by La Golondrina, available on all major music platforms. La Golondrina is a singer, songwriter, musician and poet Rita Ortiz. There are six songs, three of which are originals, and three that are covers: two rancheras and one Huapango, “Cucurrucucu Paloma.” You don’t need to know much about Mexican music to love how Ortiz’s voice soars and goes deep. Ortiz also plays the French Horn and the vihuela, a Mexican instrument that resembles a small guitar and is used specifically in Mariachi ensembles. La Golondrina is well known in San Antonio, where I live, and my hope is that this EP will garner national attention.
Admittedly, I don’t see many movies and I don’t own a TV. Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth is one that has never left me, though. The magical realism of literature comes alive as we watch young Ofelia enter a fantasy world to escape the horrors of Franco’s Spain after the Spanish Civil War. While her misogynistic stepfather commits brutal acts of violence, Ofelia makes her way into a mythological underworld and ends up processing the trauma she is living through as she encounters power and fear that eerily mirror the effects of fascist authoritarianism on her people. It’s a hallucinogenic, beautiful and disturbing film, and certainly has similarities to what we’ve been experiencing in the U.S. It’s a great work of art, and a film that artists and writers of conscience would appreciate on many levels.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He lives with his family in south Texas.