Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Beast Meridian is a fierce incantation, harnessing the intuition and intelligence of personae navigating a “melancholy galaxy” full of the violences of societies and families, in which the pain of the earth and the pain of the body are not separate. In languages of tenderness and weaponry, landscapes and bodyscapes, insight and foresight, talismanic memories and imaginings, Vanessa Angelica Villareal constructs layered complications to see newly into, or grieve not being able to look beyond. Far from surrender, the poems write toward a communal resilience: “entre todas las mujeres we kneel to push away the final night”—a unity among wounded women, their collective mythology infused with necessary interrogations and radiant intensity, as they (and their words) “spill & spill until we spread / like a flood.” - Khadijah Queen 

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a 2018 Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize, and a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog.