Zamora - Of Form & Gather

of form & gatherTHE ANDRS MONTOYA POETRY PRIZE 2004, Pity the Drowned Horses, Sheryl Luna
Final Judge: Robert Vasquez 2006, The Outer Bands, Gabriel Gomez
Final Judge: Valerie Martnez 2008, My Kill Adore Him, Paul Martnez Pompa
Final Judge: Martn Espada 2010, Tropicalia, Emma Trelles
Final Judge: Silvia Curbelo 2012, A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying, Laurie Ann Guerrero
Final Judge: Francisco X. Alarcn 2014, Furious Dusk, David Campos
Final Judge: Rhina P. Espaillat 2016, Of Form & Gather, Felicia Zamora
Final Judge: Edwin Torres The Andrs Montoya Poetry Prize, named after the late California native and author of the award-winning book, The Iceworker Sings, supports the publication of a first book by a Latino or Latina poet. Awarded every other year, the prize is administered by Letras Latinasthe literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. of form & gather FELICIA ZAMORA UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS NOTRE DAME, INDIANA University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright 2017 by Felicia Zamora All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America LC 2016053423 ISBN-13: 978-0-268-10178-7 ISBN-10: 0-268-10178-7 PDF: 978-0-268-10179-4 EPUB: 978-0-268-10180-0 ISBN 9780268101800 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor.

Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at . for Chris as always, you know why The growing presence of the butterfly in her Does not fill her with fear. And this world inside another, larger cocoon. Ale teger, The Book of Things All day long I feel created. Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm We value that droning inner voice. I cannot see.

What ascension in things? I ask Sally Keith, designContents by Edwin Torres Book of the Robin in the Bird
(Or Chick Embryo Development) Thank-you to the editors of the following journals and presses in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in different forms: The Adirondack Review, Distinct Separation Felt BOMB, The America Gap The Burnside Review, Sower The Cincinnati Review, In tuck Columbia Poetry Review, In extant and This lure Cutbank Literary Journal, In still Hotel Amerika, This tug and Of ghosts Indiana Review, Decoy Juked, Book of the Robin in the Bird: II. Primative Streak Meridian, & in wonder too Notre Dame Review, Same river Phoebe, No Fisher Pleiades, Book of the Robin in the Bird: VI. Allantois driesthe chick uses her own lungs Poetry Northwest, Continuous Non-Replication Salt Hill, Con-Form Third Coast, In fasten-nation TriQuarterly, In practice and Fallible Roundness West Branch, Not not and In outline Witness, In middle with other, O for Passage, and Peel-Back The following poems were first published in a chapbook-length publication in Verse as winner of the 2015 Toma alamun Prize: Where you find yourself Physics of where we stand To know little In patterns In the breast of Drift To begin & wings made of matchsticks Thank-you to Letras Latinas at the University of Notre Dames Institute for Latino Studies for creating and supporting Latinos in poetry with the Andrs Montoya Poetry Prize. Thank-you to the University of Notre Dame Press. I am forever grateful to Edwin Torres for selecting my manuscript and allowing these poems a chance to speak to the world. I am honored.

Warm thanks to my mentors and dear friends, Stephanie GSchwind and John Calderazzo, your encouragement, time, and listening ears have meant the world to me. Much love to Mel and Joe for your constant belief in me and support. Weve always had each other, which allows for magic. Thank-you to my mother for planting the seed; I love you. Deepest appreciation to my partner, friend, and confidant, Chris. You hear my poems over and over again with honest patience.

Your unwavering advocacy for my poetic life and your love keeps all this alive. You are my person, my love, and my inspiration. With its measured and continual revelation, Felicia Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolutionthe poems breath, the poets bodypassing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage. In Of Form & Gather, poems become choral assemblages to their proximity, tuned into the makers spirit as coiled out from unhurried interactions with ancestral zygotes. Where does identity invoke place over silenceintimate implications of nuance, trust in the readers ability to move in concert with the writers soul? If even a fraction of beyond-space is gleaned by possibility, the makers job is done. If one could imagine what awaits between where one could go and why one has remained, would that bring us to a finite completiona cyclic undercarriage of removal in the language remaining? Zamoras reminder is to affect each part of the poem by implementing a profoundly gentle humanity that connects to the shifting external across borders, continuously returning to invention with a charge to the think, a dare to the heart, that allows movement in the ubiquity of silence.

In a sort of volcanic empathy with spirits invoked by the sling of creation across centuries borrowed and replanted. A poems burden is to live inside its creation, where the organized singularity of its gathering is what brings the reader to the readers own voice. We are a culture redefined when we step into the culture that defines usto expose its incomparable reach with the breath that moves us, with our bodys volumetric rhythms shifting among our human matter. To own that geo-shift, to bring about other as in, to affect change by knowing that change needs to happen beneath layers of cognition, underneath our organized paradigms. This is quietly revolutionary work that throws a gauntlet to the social diaspora. A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement by breathing in a simultaneity of opposing forcesas tectonic plates of hearing that create fissures inside the unfolding kinetic.

If my job is to shepherd the reader through new terrain, let me introduce you to the lungs between the linesthe breathing of an object formed as one continuous vertebrationpage to page, word to other. My obligation is to get out of my own way, to allow the work in its bio-syntactic intensity to speak quietly, without introduction or promise. So Ill leave you with this: the ability to chart your course through your own questions is a human trait that you have the obligation to nurture. To wondrously allow your capacity for travel and enlarge your perception of a world continuously expanding, in whatever direction you choose. Read this work, look about you, and take a breath. We dont often have moments that bore deep and give back.

Thank-you, Felicia, for giving us that opening. Edwin Torres, Judge Droplets decorate the pane; what clouds carry, storm in their chests; disobedient sky rotates axis into light; easts promise of dusk & muddles of middle bide time in our retinas, make us afford fleeting; strip you of garden, of plot of ability to plant anything; your hands in wet soil, womb of; say seed; say connection giftsyousomething heals in the dark, in knowing the bright departs & returns, brings lightening you cup your hands to ears for. One fallen petal ebbs ina puddle between showers. Do you feellapping? On your back you see mirrors above, see mirrors below. Behind partitions, where work unfolds you desire