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Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Echoing the collection’s provocative title, final judge Edwin Torres writes: “Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolution—the poem’s breath, the poet’s body—passing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage.” Privileging journey over destination, Zamora’s poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things. Edwin Torres continues: “This is quietly revolutionary work. . . . A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement." With the publication of this volume, the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, now in its seventh edition, emphatically makes good on its aim to nurture the various paths that Latino/a poetry is taking in the twenty-first century.
“The author cleverly incorporates scientific jargon; moreover, the musicality and grace shine through in this trailblazing collection. Zamora is a singular talent and necessary voice in Latinx letters; in American letters.” —The Poetry Question
Felicia Zamora is the author of six poetry books including, I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Quotient (forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions, 2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, POETRY, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Poems by Edwin Torres
1. circles & circulations
Where you find yourself
To know little
Distinct Separation Felt
Continuous Non-Replication
In the breast of
Of ghosts
Fallible Roundness
In layer In fasten-nation The America Gap Prank This tug Con-Form
2. that that that; this this this
In stage
Peel-back
In still
O for Passage
Promise
Book of the Robin in the Bird (Or Chick Embryo Development)
3. in in; gather gather
In patterns
Sower
In middle with other
In tuck
This lure
Not not
In extant
& in wonder too
In outline
Same river
In practice
In spell
To begin
4. To be out of—dually other
Decoy
Physics of where we stand
No Fisher
Drift
& wings made of matchsticks