The University of Arizona Press
December 18, 2023
Celebrate winter with four new collections of poetry from UA Press. We publish two veteran poets, the Ambroggio Prize winner, and one poet’s first collection. May this poetry bring light and warmth to close out 2023, and begin the new year brightly.
Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) writes in conversational style; and this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. Celebrate on January 30, 2024, with Ortiz as he reads and discusses his poetry on the University of Arizona campus. Click here for details.
Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. In her new collection, Ancient Light, she uses uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems.
Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, by Margarita Pintado Burgos (Author) and Alejandra Quintana Arocho (Translator), is the Winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. With devastating clarity, Pintado Burgos’s poems, presented in both Spanish and English, give voice to the world within and beyond sight: the plants, the trees, the birds, the ocean waves, the fruit forgotten in the kitchen, the house’s furniture. Inspired by the poet’s homeland in Puerto Rico, light takes on new dimensions to expose, manipulate, destroy, and nourish.
In his first published collection Yaguareté White, Diego Báez writes in English, Spanish, and Guaraní. The languages encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Baéz revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.
