This Tangled Body by Carmen Calatayud (forthcoming)

“In Carmen Calatayud’s astounding collection This Tangled Body, surreal imagery and language cut and soar to make luminous a pain that is both individual and generational. Anyone who has missed—as I have—poetry born out of the grit of lived experience and transmuted into indelible lyric should buy this book at once. As a member of the same generation, I am moved and haunted by how acutely Calatayud captures our yearning and our restlessness, teaching us to love with renewed vigor our much-broken world. Calatayud writes ‘I don’t know peace but I know/ how to speak under my breath./How to make noise.’ I am in love with every poem in this wild, original, and utterly necessary book.”

~Sheila Black, author of Radium Dream and editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability

“ ‘Life started as the time between wars/then became the wars themselves,’ writes Carmen Calatayud in This Tangled Body, a lyrical collection meditating on the body’s internalization of perpetual global conflict. Living rooms are war zones created by parents ‘who survived war themselves’ and intimates are enemy combatants that treat bodies as battlefields. As such, the poet’s language oscillates between lustful and concussive, creating verse that lives in the pleasure-pain duality of the body’s experience. Calatayud seeks to untangle herself from the stranglehold trauma has on the optimism and self-determined healing she is seeking. In essence, this collection reminds us that the only way to ‘Love as if today [is our] last day on the planet’ is to love hard.”

~John Olivares Espinoza, author of The Date Fruit Elegies

“Let Carmen Calatayud's poetry guide you in uncovering what lies beyond the wall. With the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnam War, and conflicts in Central America as backdrops, it offers an intimate glimpse of the battle on the home front of our pathologies. This struggle includes literal and metaphorical body counts, and the cyclic torment of trying to flee the emotional front lines of our lives through addiction. Calatayud leads us to ‘negotiate with decades of despondency’ while ‘welcoming all the beings of the broken world.’ Finally, we are compelled to admit the truth about our own secrets, even if it is only to ourselves.”

~Angelina Sáenz, author of Edgecliff and Maestra

“Open This Tangled Body, and you will find imagery like Lorca’s that stuns you and takes you out of this world into an expanding universe. Open this book and you will find a heart continually opening to encompass your own wounds. This collection straddles the spirit world and what we call the real world by taking us to the land of the dead with all its terrifying ghosts and then resuscitating us. From the first poem, we, too, believe in ‘the skeleton of a horse (that) runs along the wall.’ Calatayud steps compassionately over all borders to face a history of abuse and injustice—from a complicated family history to xenophobia to her own violated woman’s body—to find healing. In these beautifully crafted poems, Calatayud faces destruction to rise from the ashes and ultimately find grace.”

~Pamela Uschuk, author of Crazy Love, winner of the American Book Award and Refugee, a Kirkus Review top favorite book

Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrants: A Spanish father and Irish mother. Her 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. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Anti-Heroin Chic, Cutthroat, Gargoyle, Poet Lore, Rogue Agent and Tahoma Literary Journal, and in various anthologies. She is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner, a Best of La Bloga winner, a Best of the Net Poetry nominee and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.