Winner, 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize
Sara Lupita Olivares’s Migratory Sound, winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, looks back to generational narratives of Mexican American migration, examining linguistic and geographic boundaries as it journeys north along routes of seasonal fieldwork and factory labor. “Whether enacting a bird migration, or the uprooting of people relocating north, or the private movement from sleep to alert vigilance,” series editors Carolina Ebeid and Carmen Giménez Smith observe, “Olivares’s stark poetry concerns the precarious idea of place and its underlying ‘unplace.’ She makes evident how every place bears a relationship with an elsewhere, an over there sometimes situated underneath.”
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Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of the chapbook Field Things (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, DIAGRAM, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a PhD from Western Michigan University, she is assistant professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.
“This is a rare, evocative, and haunting book. For its sparse song of indwelling in landscapes of austerity; for its understanding of description as a function subordinate to wakefulness of mind, for its process of perception that splits the difference between animal and oblivion, habit and habitat, doubt and debt—I found myself returning again and again to its atmospheric method of knowing; to its structure of restraint and elegance.”
—Roberto Tejada, 2020 series judge and author of Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness
“Migratory Sound offers a new generation the rarity (in the company of Celan, Juarroz, and Valentine) of a poetry voiced in full presence, low volume. Over and over, Olivares gives form to trusting that intelligence is inseparable from sensoralities. There’s a fearlessness here, humility before the mysteries, and great love.”
—Kathleen Peirce, author of Vault
“If a figure is anything with a physical presence, Sara Lupita Olivares’s poems are a kind of figure study with an audio dimension: what do we see in our seeing, what do we hear (and what do we miss) in our listening? These are poems that undraw the outlines of shape and sound to perceive their astonishing essences.”
—Nancy Eimers, author of Oz
“Few debuts contain the sheer force that Sara Lupita Olivares achieves in Migratory Sound. From beginning to end, I was enthralled with the endless modes of engagement between the self and the landscape that challenge the legacies of the pastoral. The book is neither observation, nor event; neither artifact nor memory, but rather an innovative dialogue that deconstructs the role the landscape has historically played as a source of knowledge, beauty, resource, vision, and enlightenment. I recognize in Migratory Sound a deep respect for the sacredness of language, and Olivares fortuitously bears this burden and responsibility that any great poet assumes, despite the wreckage it might cause. Read this book and allow yourself to experience a lyricism that will haunt you.”
—Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Cenzontle
“I love the wakeful vigilance of these poems, how they teach me to feel and see anew. They arise out of the great silence that surrounds them, hewn from an interior meadow into luminous thought. What it is around them that is not said I cannot say, but the counterbalance there is looming and stunning. In Olivares’s deft hands, I am awakened to many things, as if secretly: the shifting field inside or outside the frame, the absent body language suggests, what is disappearing from view. In this way, these poems are deeply, quietly philosophical and political—an urgent call to attention and to care.”
—Eleni Sikelianos, author of What I Knew
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgments
Night
*
Moment Where I Keep What I’d Wanted to Give
Animalier: On Stasis
Where the Field Retracted
Etymology
Of Small Spaces
Migratory Sound
* *
Drawings of a Red-Billed Pigeon
Correspondence
Glimpse
When Considering the Water
Circuit
To Make Beauty in Some Sense Imperishable
Of Inheritance
The Field as a Circle
Respond to View
* * *
On Balance
Pastoral
Clemency
Moment to Moment
Fertility
Form
Static
On Remoteness
* * * *
Implied Surroundings
Drawing of a Bear Walking
Manifest
Sleepwalk
What Never Converges
Hinge
Lies About Horses
Worn-Yard Games
Seasons
* * * * *
Numbers
Against
Honorable Wreckage
Toward
Forest
Stairway
Certain Noise
Radiant
Tint
* * * * * *
Clarities
Collective
Pattern Without Line
What Is Your Grief
To Watch
Within Hands
On Forgetting
Without Vanishing
* * * * * * *
Small Ghost
Jaw in Grass
About Oblivion
Maps
Openings
What Do You See
Resemblances
Drawn Animals
Notes
Latinx poets remain underrepresented in both US poetry and Latin American poetry despite their longstanding presence and influence within both of these literary traditions. The CantoMundo Poetry Series endeavors to expand this representational space by showcasing work by contemporary US-based Latinx poets from across the linguistic, aesthetic, stylistic, and cultural spectrum in which they write. The series is open to all US-based Latinx writers—not just those who have been or are currently CantoMundo Fellows—regardless of citizenship status or previous publication record. The series values the traditions and communities from which contemporary Latinx poets emerge while also encouraging an engagement with innovative Latinx aesthetics and poetics.
