Like a “Virgin”

BY: Claire Connors

The poetry of Mexican-American feminist writer Analicia Sotelo has been selected as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize. The collection, in her book, Virgin, is a vivid portrait of Latina writer as a young woman. Published by Milkweed Editions in February, Virgin is gathering reviews usually earned by poets far older and more experienced than Sotelo.

As described on the Milkweed website:

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.

Read her poem Do You Speak Virgin below:

This wedding is some hell:​

A bouquet of cacti wilting in my hand
while my closest friends​

sit on a bar bench,
stir the sickles in their drinks,
smile up at me.​

The moon points out my neckline
like a chaperone. ​

My veil is fried tongue and chicken wire,
hanging off to one side. ​

I am a Mexican American fascinator.

Let me cluck my way to an empty field
where my husband

stays silent most of the time
and the stars are like the arachnid eyes

of my mother-in-law: duplicitous,
ever-present in the dark.

I’m not afraid of sex.

I’m afraid of his skeleton
knocking against the headboard

in the middle of the night.

I’m afraid I am a blind goat with a ribbon
in my hair, with screws for eyes.

I’m afraid wherever I walk, it’s purgatory.
I meet a great lake with rust-colored steam

rising, someone somewhere
has committed murder, is hiding

in the bushes with an antique mirror.

~

The virgins are here to prove a point.
The virgins are here to tell you to fuck off.

The virgins are certain there’s a circle of hell
dedicated to that fear you’ll never find anyone else.

You know what it looks like:

all the lovers cloaked in blood
and salt and never satisfied,

a priest collar like a giant tooth
in the midnight sky.

I want to know what’s coming in the afterlife
before I sign off on arguments

in the kitchen, and the sight of him
fleeing to the car

once he sees how far and wide,
how dark and deep

this frigid female mind can go.