Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), recipient of a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, New York Magazine's The Cut, The Nation, Oxford American, Poetry Magazine, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a forthcoming essay collection, Magical / Realism (Spring 2024, Tiny Reparations Books, Penguin Random House) and her second poetry collection while raising her son.
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Beast MeridianFrom"Guadalupe, Star-Horned Taurus"
That I commune with the dead as I oil your feet. My house at the throat of the river, the door to this world, I wait for you. That I ask of the spirit and receive the knowledges: yerbabuena, vela de virgen, baño de alhucema. Cut the joint at the hoof & fatten the soup. Accept this offering, thank the plant. That I love you with the knowledge of our ways lost to violence. That you will call me up from the silt in your bones.
Beast Meridian: -
Beast MeridianFrom"Thirteen"
I was thirteen when I first felt a blonde boy. I still cough up his cornsilk, wind the spit in my fingers. Fresh white breasts in the grass. Brown nipples like mushrooms. July rubied with red stars. Boys float their bicycles into the trees. No one gets in trouble but us. Blackberries erupt over the river. We escape a patrolling moon. Trespassing is passage. Is there a plan to dip the girl in ink, to lustre the hook from which she will droop. The jaw hangs open. The yard is lousy with dead dogs. To resuscitate. To resuscitate.
Beast Meridian:
". . . Villarreal interlocks her story with that of other Latin@s who have already survived, or are still working through the pain of what Anzaldúa called the herida abierta, the open wound of the border. Correctly applied, Villarreal suggests by example, a red-hot poetry can cauterize such wounds." —Cassandra Cleghorn, Los Angeles Review of Books [on Beast Meridian]
"Vanessa Villarreal’s poems are alive, haired, precise and strange with ardor, with loss, with a remembering (live and lit!) born out of the crossroads of elegy and desire. With these poems I feel I have the rare and gorgeous chance to experience a formal invention built out of urgency, and with such intimacy. Here there is a diction, a music, knived and lucid. A body, or bodies, shapeshifting across pages, possessed and dispossessing, dying-birthing-getting born, simultaneously 'I' and 'we': 'your black cervix my first egg drop & / so we hatched myself—.' There is such a brilliance everywhere here." —Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria [on Beast Meridian]
"The power and pulse in Villarreal’s debut collection of poems comes from the courage to write ‘for the great violences hidden inside women/ For the women hidden inside great violences.’ Her emotional territory is expansive, reaching far into the mythologies of Mexico and the borderlands, the recesses of family traumas, and the plight of personal demons. Taking linguistic, structural, and expressive risks, this book is necessary ‘to survive this nightmare so American.’” —Rigoberto Gonzalez, NBC News [on Beast Meridian]
The poems of Vanessa Angélica Villarreal transport readers into a wilderness, a porous border world of dual (or multiple) identities. Visually striking, rooted in the borderlands, Beast Meridian is a fiercely feminist book that refuses easy closure and answers. The lines blaze with anger and empathy, and the craft astonishes. Beast Meridian will serve as an example of what’s possible in American poetry in the twenty-first century. In a word: gorgeous.