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Interstitial Archaeology
Felicia Zamora
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval, Series Editors
Ronald Wallace, Founding Series Editor
“Interstitial Archaeology is all-consuming. It’s a marvel. Sometimes, a poetry collection feels like inhabiting the vast and intricate estate of a person’s imagination, as if entering a cathedral, where the saints, captured in stained glass, are the chalk-outlined martyrs haunting our newsfeeds. Felicia Zamora incorporates all knowledge: math, myth, and memory, from Emerson to Audre Lorde. The poetic forms included here are like a collection of fragments from a lost city. This book is impossibly good. These poems are both grounded and otherworldly. Prepare yourself. Eat a big breakfast and pack a lunch. This book is a journey.”
—Amaud Jamaul Johnson
What exists in the gaps: wanting wanting.
Water permeates this stunning collection—ocean, lake, saliva, tears, sweat, blood—and the deeper Felicia Zamora excavates the purer it becomes. Revisiting her childhood as a Latina living in poverty in the United States, Zamora explores racial trauma, estrangement from inherited culture and language, and the instinct to retreat into the body as a space of understanding. Grounded in the specificity of her history, her body, and her life, these poems find the universal threads that connect hummingbirds to whales, Galapagos tortoises to Matt Groening cartoons, family photographs to joy and heartache.
Zamora scavenges her past and America’s present for the hidden meanings at the borders of the social and environmental, linguistic and physical, familial and personal. Along the way she enters into conversations with other poets, activists, and scholars, seeking wisdom, tracing wounds, and amplifying the voices of the marginalized, ultimately creating a space to constellate radical imagination.
“To be born a problem was to swallow silence: medicine meant to erase. To be groomed into
falsities that a word like beauty held space for
only other words: blue, green, hazel, white,
blonde, ivory, white, white. A definition
depends on who speaks & who remains silent.”
—Excerpt from “Lilacs”
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including Quotient; I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner; and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. She won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from the Georgia Review, a Tin House Next Book Residency, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Table of Contents
Claws Wide in the Mirror
Meditations on Lines
Chirality
Lilacs
Ghazal Containing My Estranged Mexican Tongue
Meditations on Flesh
Learned Intimacy
Abecedarian for My Estranged Mexican Tongue
Exhume
Meditations on Ghosts
Inscribing Anew
Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility
Leaving Halves
Poem about Human Habits of Consumption That Begins with Contemplating the Walnut in My Yard
To Haunt Air: In Consideration of Longing, the Potoo, Desire, Gallstones, & What We Remain Still For
Tautology of Phrases, Tautology of Mathematical Logic in a Time of Climate Crisis
Taut Logic of Crisis
Errata
Triptych of Understanding Law as a Human-Made Construct with Fundamental & Detrimental Errors
Excavation
In the Cellular
A Sharp Dawn
Interstitial Archaeology: Make My Mouth a Temple Now, without the Severing of Life or Organ to Unhaunt the Silences Lorde Warns Us About
Moratorium
To Put Meat Back
Hawk Hymn
Used to Be
Monster Talk
Tempest in the Cerebellum
Mars Exploration: Poem for Diana Trujillo & the Work of Wonder
How Fire Works: A Fourth of July Consideration
Monopoly
Neuron Fire: Or I Want Brown & Black & Queer Joy to Be Ubiquitous: Or What We’re Made of Connects Us, Fuck: Or I Am Writing This Poem when I Should Be Out Protesting so This Poem Is a Protest Instead
The Bird
Chris Martin Sings Shiver & I Shiver: A Poem for Madam Vice President
Acknowledgments
Notes
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