Every month is a month to celebrate poetry, but when it’s “National Poetry Month” you really got to celebrate it and to help us do that we’ve got three powerful poets—Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, Megan Pinto, and Jordan Windholz—to share their work.
“There are fevers you still wish to forget,” writes Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, but how fortunate for the rest of us that he remembers. These tenderly crafted autobiographical poems pierce through to the heart of pain, love, loss, and the ongoing search for salvation—or at least a salve. Housed in the lived experiences of a queer Latinx person born and raised in the border town of El Paso, Cowboy Park seamlessly blends themes of masculinity, identity, and the immigrant experience, offering a new perspective on the iconic image of the cowboy and a deeper understanding of the complexities of human experience.
The detainment and deportation of Martínez-Leyva’s brother grounds this exquisite collection in the all-too-common familial tragedy of political violence and discrimination. Martínez-Leyva honors the people, language, culture, and traditions that shaped him, revealing the indignities, large and small, experienced by a community that is too often misrepresented and maligned. “My voice was the only thing keeping us warm,” he writes, and the warmth from this striking debut collection is beautiful to behold.
“I am absolutely wowed by this book; each word, line, and stanza are invigoratingly precise. Martínez-Leyva is a poet who has done the painstaking work of craft, and he knows its power to deliver the reader to an often difficult, often spectacular reflection on survival. A beautiful, exacting, and triumphant collection.”— Lynn Melnick
The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons.
Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.”
—Asa Drake in SPLIT LIP MAG
A lyric meditation on childhood, adulthood, parenting, grief, fear, and joy, The Sisters is a book of prose poems that began as bedtime stories. A kaleidoscopic invocation of imagined lives, these poems transform familiar myths, fables, and fairy tales into whimsical worlds that are a bit more fragile and bit more true.
Through a series of prose poems, The Sisters confronts what it means to raise children and grow up amid climate catastrophes, insistent threats of gender-based violence, and the shocks of late-stage capitalism. These are ethereal and eerie stories full of torn edges, a series of dazzling lullabies that will soothe you awake.
“ ‘See them,’ begins Jordan Windholz’s marvelous new collection, The Sisters, and so we do: Prismatic and lush, these portraits hover among fable, phantasm, and tender depictions that convey the ‘insistent buzz of the day’s glass minutes.’ They show us the sisters, ‘their bodies bright ideas the sky thinks and forgets.’ And they show us the semblances that bring the world into relation: ‘air shaken into petals,’ ‘the wind making a door of itself.’ Windholz’s elegant, imaginative prose poems are mesmerizingly spectral—not like a ghost but like a spectrum of light.”— Zach Savich
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, TX to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Boston Review, The Journal, Frontier Poetry, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Cowboy Park, was selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson as the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and is published by The University of Wisconsin Press.
Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection, just out from Four Way Books. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.Org, Ploughshares, and in The Slowdown podcast. Megan lives in Brooklyn.
Jordan Windholz is the author of The Sisters (Black Ocean, 2024) and Other Psalms (University of North Texas Press, 2015), winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. His poems have been published in Boston Review, Seneca Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and the tiny journal, among a number of other places. He lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.