Full Description
"Fanged and feathered," Laura Villareal fights against expectations imbedded in her existence—the expectations bound in being a woman, being queer, being Latinx—and claws her way to her own identity. Her poetry covers a vast range, invoking Mexican folklore, exploring the process of healing while hurting, and the complicated conflict between intergenerational trauma and the love of family—continuously reasserting that leaving is never a singular action, that healing isn't completed in a day, that living is a process, not a straight line.
Tumbleweeds and wandering cacti litter the page, coyotes croon at the prose. In poems haunted by specters of intimate partner violence, Girl's Guide to Leaving considers what it means to escape the love that trapped you and find a temporary home in the barely cooled ashes of a wildfire.
listen this part is importantyou must never let yourself try & find the first place you
took root you must live like a tumbleweed
you must never call out into the desert blue night
but you will anyways I know this you'll cry out
as the coyotes do weep
—Excerpt from "Desert Note"
Contents
Girl's Guide to Leaving
Trapping Season
The Conditions for Existing as Proposed by X, Y, & Z (What Makes Sense, What's Safe, What's Productive)
Before Skipping Town
Sardine Spine
The Long Trajectory of Grief
Afterwards
I Still Check for Monsters Before I Go to Bed
Baby Teeth
Outgrowing a Home
Desert Note
The Astronomer's Daughter
Crush
Home Is Where the Closet Is
Inside the Foxhole
Inside All the Places I Can't See
Down By the Water
Slash-and-Burn
If I Invited You to Love Me
Mother // Monster
Thanksgivings
Heart Attack
Curas & Dichos
My Worries Have Worries
Uncertainty with Fish Scales
Solar Eclipse // Myself In Orbit
(My)thology
A Bedtime Story About the Heart
Ending in Contrition or Resignation
When Joy Split Open
Seeds
Boiling Puffins
8 Chickens in a Papier-MÂché Human: A Bedtime Story
Before You Visited
Acknowledgments
