Books

This Tangled Body

This Tangled Body by Carmen Calatayud reads as surreal poetic memoir, navigating family history, war, migration and the grit of relationships. Through lyrical language, she searches for ways to rescue a body that knows pain, addiction and generational trauma. Elegies, love letters and concussions cross paths here, along with planets and stars, demonstrating that the potential to heal is possible when raw truth and grace are present. Calatayud’s willingness to face the land of the dead and cross all borders is on full display. As she invites us to “leave this continent and/light the path behind us on fire,” her poetry insists we return to love, and love hard.

  • “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. 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. 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 Central American conflicts as backdrops, This Tangled Body offers an intimate glimpse of the battle on the home front of our pathologies. 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 takes you out of this world into an expanding universe, and 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.”

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

In the Company of Spirits

In the Company of Spirits is a journey that crosses borders of countries, cities, cultures and the dream world. There is poetry of conscience that includes the effects of war, and the voices of veterans, the homeless, migrants, ancestors and angels. Calatayud weaves the spiritual throughout this collection and fills us with the promise that none of us have been forgotten, even in the midst of surreal heartbreak. The desire to tell the truth about love, life, death and grief through a mystical lens is Calatayud’s vocation, and it is this pursuit that made In the Company of Spirits a runner up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.

  • “The poems in In the Company of Spirits journey to the borderlands—between nations, languages, people, the living and dead…..Gorgeous, hurting, heartbreaking: these are the poems I’ll take on my own journey toward truth.”

    ~Sarah Browning, author of Killing Summer and Whiskey in the Garden of Eden

  • “Carmen Calatayud’s poems are ‘love stories from the ruins.’ Unflinching and brave, her language winds through the wreckage of war zones and borderlands, but it also pauses to praise and to question the human heart.”

    ~Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine and winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Slow Lightning

  • “Carmen Calatayud’s courageous poems not only sing, but talk straight from the heart about love and death, the everyday as well as the inexplicable…..It is this fearless desire to tell the truth that makes the poems in In the Company of Spirits matter.”

    ~Devreaux Baker, winner of the PEN Oakland award for Red Willow People

there is so much I want to tell you: a Corazón Collective Poetry Anthology

Corazón Collective Authors:
Carmen Calatayud, jo reyes-boitel, Angelina Sáenz, ire’ne lara silva, Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

Come closer to immerse yourself in the beautiful choque of the Corazón Collective’s poetry. Journey through the borders of hearts, daily lives, and dreams of five Latinx writers representing diverse cultural, linguistic, and geographic backgrounds. Here, you’ll inhale the smoke of addiction and war. Lovers are simultaneously adored, expelled, and longed for. Bodies are contemplated, adorned in vintage queer, and laid bare. Embrace the duality of carrying both death and medicine. This collection serves as your muse to witness, soar, and squawk over the sojourns, wounds, and triumphs of these extraordinary writers: Dive in.

  • "The Corazón Collective is a five-pointed star, unapologetic in their pursuit to liberate us through mystical mayhem. Each poet carries her own ideas and concerns, but collectively they are shapeshifters utilizing all the tools, from staggering free verse to zen-like observations. Their voices and razor insights are timely and relentless."

    ~Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Some of the Light

  • "These poetas write from the heart and the gut, from the third eye y el alma. Any one of them has so much to tell us, at times coaxing, at times pulling us in by the collar, at times recounting a dream, sleep still in our eyes. Here, together, they remind us that everything is fleeting. Listen."

    ~Michelle Otero, author of Vessels: A Memoir of Borders

  • "there is so much I want to tell you is a collection of Fierce Mother Poems. Uncompromising Woman Poems. Powerful Sister Poems. Witnesses we become, to others, to ourselves, to the Spirits who visit us still, and have found their home in this formidable reckoning. These poems haunt, lift us up, salute the sun, and wonder from which direction the wind is coming."

    ~Denise Chávez, author of Loving Pedro Infante and A Taco Testimony