In the Company of Spirits

“Gorgeous, hurting, heartbreaking: these are the poems I’ll take on my own journey toward truth.”

~SARAH BROWNING

Carmen Calatayud was born in the U.S to immigrant war survivors, a Spanish father and Irish mother.

Her book In the Company of Spirits was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and was an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist. Her poetry has appeared in print and online in journals such as Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Virginia Quarterly Review and Verse Daily, and numerous anthologies. She is a Larry Neal Poetry Award winner and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. Carmen is a somatic psychotherapist and DC native who lives in San Antonio, Texas.

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Praise for In the Company of Spirits

  • “In the Company of Spirits is a collection to be devoured on the first read, savored on the second, and taken deep into the heart on the third, the fourth, and beyond.”

    — Naomi Benaron, winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction for Running the Rift

  • “The gaze in these poems is unflinching, as well as drenched with imagination. In the Company of Spirits will indeed enrich the ever-expanding mosaic of Latino/a poetry.”

    — Francisco Aragón, author of Glow of Our Sweat and Puerto del Sol, director of Letras Latinas at University of Notre Dame

  • “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