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Re: Aborted poetic projects. I’ve been second guessing my reasons for stopping a project dead in its tracks. With all of this blog reorganization, and with all of these final Diwata edits, I have been sifting through my old work and thinking about the poems I consider the stragglers. These are the ones which have ended up not making it into the book manuscripts. Last year, these poems comprised two chapbooks, but I am now wondering whether full-length books may come out of these aborted projects. What became the chapbook Cherry, for example. I keep picking the idea back up, starting in on finding source material, then putting it back down. But it’s exactly that aversion I feel toward the source material which makes the poems so prickly and obscene.

About Cherry

Thanks to Collin Kelley for his write-up on Cherry. An Excerpt:

The word cherry was long ago co-opted into slang for the loss of virginity (specifically breaking a girl/woman’s hymen), but it’s also used by the military for inexperienced soldiers and by frat boys and geeks to describe everything from a tricked out car to unopened action figure. In Cherry, Reyes explores the sexualization of Asian women by white men (especially those conservative Bible-thumpers) and how a generation of men fetishized Asian women after their experiences in Korea, Vietnam and how it continues with America’s occupation of those nations, in global advertising, eroticized misogyny and sex-slavery. In “Accessories,” Reyes writes: “We’re Asian, we’re girls, we’re kind of cute, and in the tradition of the mouthless Hello Kitty, we don’t even have to speak.”

Mini-chaps: Poems-For-All

At Flor y Canto, these awesome little one-poem chaps, which are a fantastic idea and fantastic production, were everywhere (organizers and volunteers were just handing them out and leaving them on people’s chairs):

www.sacfreepress.com/poems/

These little chaps are 2.0 inches tall x 1.75 inches wide!

(For scale, see my lip gloss tube at the top of the pic)

Top Row: Nicholas Guillen, “Proposito,” and Jack Hirschman, “The Xibalba Arcane: No. 13.”

Middle Row: Roque Dalton, “Advice,” and Julia de Burgos, “To Julia de Burgos.”

Bottom Row: Jose Montoya, “Chicanos Before the War, Raza Before the War,” and Ernesto Cardenal, “Epigrama.”