Virgin

Poetry

Virgin

“By leaning into the many registers of heartbreak, Sotelo makes something incredibly beautiful.” —ROSS GAY
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Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman.

In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women, how “far & wide, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go.” A schoolgirl hopelessly in love. A daughter abandoned by her father. A seeming innocent in a cherry-red cardigan, lurking at the margins of a Texas barbeque. A contemporary Ariadne with her monstrous Theseus. A writer with a penchant for metaphor and a character who thwarts her own best efforts. “A Mexican American fascinator.”

At every step, Sotelo’s poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail—grilled meat, golden habañeros, and burnt sugar—before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, deceit, relationships, and ourselves. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. Here is what it means to be cruel. And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self.

Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets. 

ISBN:
9781571315007
Publish Date: 
02/13/2018
Pages: 
112
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.38 in
Weight: 
5.9 oz
Author

Analicia Sotelo is the author of Virgin, the inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, selected by Ross Gay, to be published by Milkweed Editions in February 2018. She is also the author of Nonstop Godhead, which was selected by Rigoberto González for a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship.

Praise and Prizes

Blog Post

Analicia Sotelo – 09/19/2017

When Milkweed Editions invited my thoughts on cover design for Virgin , I sent them a Pinterest page with visual...