Muse Found in a Colonized Body: Poems (Stahlecker Selections) - Softcover

Montilla, Yesenia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1954245327 ISBN 13: 9781954245327

Publisher: Four Way Books, 2022

Synopsis

In the book's eponymous poem, Yesenia Montilla writes, "How do you not love yourself when you / constantly survive your undoing just by being precious?" Muse Found in a Colonized Body answers this rhetorical question by populating itself with poems that range far and wide in content -- observing pop culture, interrogating history, resisting contemporary injustice -- but that share the spinal cord of unflinching love. As Rachel Eliza Griffiths notes, Montilla's "powers orbit and intuit the lives of Philando Castile, Captain America, Christian Cooper, Karl Marx, Ahmaud Arbery, Eartha Kitt, and many more while stitching our wounded identities, memories, and histories in defiant poems of revision and joyous reclamation." The vertebral odes of this collection at turns uplift desire, affirm life, celebrate protest, and condemn the violent greed of imperial usurpation that has produced the U.S. as we know it. Both in its criticism and its admiration, Muse Found in a Colonized Body calls upon its readers to rise to the occasion of these lyrics' profound care.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Muse Found in a Colonized Body

There is no greater love than the love a wolf feels
for the lamb it doesn’t eat – Hélène Cisoux

I.
They say when the Spaniards came we thought them
gods. They came with sincere eyes, but insincere
mouths and cocks they knew something about the
universe & we only knew about the earth, not
about the stars unless being guided by them is
a kind of knowing, but no, in those days the stars
knew us more than we them. & that might be the
difference between the wolf & the lamb, our
relationship to bounty. I think what I want
to say here is that to the wolf go the spoils & yet
there is something about being a lamb — the danger
the never knowing when the wolf will be hungry enough.
How do you not love yourself when you constantly
survive your undoing just by being precious?
I don’t like coyness, if I love you I will take your mouth
first because that is where the breathe lives, does that
make me a wolf, or does this: when I am near you
I shackle my intentions & feasts with my eyes, I won’t
dare eat of your flesh. How could I? It would be like
the snake that eats itself from the tail, eventually it
chokes on everything, it’s rough scales, it’s heart all
colonized & tender, the whole world becomes its
body half-eaten & dragging in the dirt—

Edition details

• Publisher: Four Way Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1954245327
• ISBN 13: 9781954245327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108