Water permeates this stunning collection—ocean, lake, saliva, tears, sweat, blood—and the deeper Felicia Zamora excavates, the sheerer it becomes. Revisiting her childhood as a Latina living in poverty in the United States, Zamora explores racial trauma, estrangement from inherited culture and language, and the instinct to retreat into the body as a space of understanding. Grounded in the specificity of her history, her body, and her life, these poems find the universal threads that constellate hummingbirds to whales, Galapagos tortoises to Matt Groening cartoons, family photographs to joy and heartache, and an insistence on human connectivity.

Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including Quotient; I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner; and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. She won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from the Georgia Review, a Tin House Next Book Residency, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for the Colorado Review.

Claws Wide in the Mirror
Meditations on Lines
Chirality
Lilacs
Ghazal Containing My Estranged Mexican Tongue
Meditations on Flesh
Learned Intimacy
Abecedarian for My Estranged Mexican Tongue
Exhume
Meditations on Ghosts

Inscribing Anew
Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility

Leaving Halves
Poem about Human Habits of Consumption That Begins with Contemplating the Walnut in My Yard
To Haunt Air: In Consideration of Longing, the Potoo, Desire, Gallstones, & What We Remain Still For
Tautology of Phrases, Tautology of Mathematical Logic in a Time of Climate Crisis
Taut Logic of Crisis
Errata
Triptych of Understanding Law as a Human-Made Construct with Fundamental & Detrimental Errors

Excavation
In the Cellular

A Sharp Dawn
Interstitial Archaeology: Make My Mouth a Temple Now, without the Severing of Life or Organ to Unhaunt the Silences Lorde Warns Us About
Moratorium
To Put Meat Back
Hawk Hymn
Used to Be
Monster Talk
Tempest in the Cerebellum
Mars Exploration: Poem for Diana Trujillo & the Work of Wonder
How Fire Works: A Fourth of July Consideration
Monopoly
Neuron Fire: Or I Want Brown & Black & Queer Joy to Be Ubiquitous: Or What We’re Made of Connects Us, Fuck: Or I Am Writing This Poem when I Should Be Out Protesting so This Poem Is a Protest Instead
The Bird
Chris Martin Sings Shiver & I Shiver: A Poem for Madam Vice President

Acknowledgments
Notes