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Ladies and Gentlemen, here is another amazing poet that I have never heard of, but who is doing some incredible things with her life, while touching and inspiring the lives of many others! I am truly happy to have run across this author, poet and teacher!
Erika L. Sánchez (born c. 1984) is a poet and writer. She is the author of poetry collection Lessons on Expulsion and a young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
Early Life and Education –
Sánchez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is from Cicero, Illinois. She has two brothers. She attended Morton East High School, then the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. After college she traveled to Madrid, Spain to teach English with the Fulbright program and pursued poetry. She then earned an MFA in poetry from the University of New Mexico.
Career –
Sánchez won a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship in 2015.
Her first poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017. The Washington Post named it to a list of best poetry of July 2017, calling it a “fierce, assertive debut”. In The New York Times, Kathleen Rooney praised Sánchez’s “wrenching explorations of guilt and shame, grief and misogyny…Her depictions of misery hurt and haunt,” particularly through her use of the second person “to draw readers close to difficult subjects.” In 2017, United States poet laureate Tracy K. Smith recommended Sánchez as among the best new voices in poetry.
Sánchez’s young adult novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter is forthcoming on October 17, 2017. Bustle named it to a list of the best 15 young adult books appearing in October 2017 and it is a finalist for the National Book Award for young people’s literature.
From 2017 to 2019, Sánchez is an arts fellow at Princeton University, teaching poetry and fiction writing.
To read more of the biography of Erika L. Sánchez, please visit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Sánchez
Please sit back, relax and enjoy the beautiful poetry of Erika L. Sanchez!
All of Us –
Admit it—
you wanted the end
with a serpentine
greed. How to negotiate
that strangling
mist, the fibrous
whisper?
To cease to exist
and to die
are two different things entirely.
But you knew this,
didn’t you?
Some days you knelt on coins
in those yellow hours.
You lit a flame
to your shadow
and ate
scorpions with your naked fingers.
So touched by the sadness of hair
in a dirty sink.
The malevolent smell
of soap.
When instead of swallowing a fistful
of white pills,
you decided to shower,
the palm trees
nodded in agreement,
a choir
of crickets singing
behind your swollen eyes.
The masked bird
turned to you
with a shred of paper hanging
from its beak.
At dusk,
hair wet and fragrant,
you cupped a goat’s face
and kissed
his trembling horns.
The ghost?
It fell prostrate,
passed through you
like a swift
and generous storm.
Saudade –
In the republic of flowers I studied
the secrets of hanging clothes I didn’t
know if it was raining or someone
was frying eggs I held the skulls
of words that mean nothing you left
between the hour of the ox and the hour
of the rat I heard the sound of two
braids I watched it rain through
a mirror am I asking to be spared
or am I asking to be spread your body
smelled like cathedrals and I kept
your photo in a bottle of mezcal
semen-salt wolf’s teeth you should have
touched my eyes until they blistered
kissed the skin of my instep for thousands
of years sealed honey never spoils
won’t crystallize I saw myself snapping
a swan’s neck I needed to air out
my eyes the droplets on a spiderweb
and the grace they held who gave me
permission to be this person to drag
my misfortune on this leash made of gold
Poem Credit: https://poets.org
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