All right.
Good evening, everyone.
So I'm introducing both sam and Erika, OK?
So just wanted to say I'm going to invoke two of their poems
from their collections, Madness, and your beautiful poetry
book that I just didn't write down in my notes.
What is it called Erika?
Lessons on Expulsion.
Lessons on Expulsion, which is devastating.
It's a devastating collection.
In sam's poem on hysteria sam sax
poses a quiet devastation in the questions.
What does it mean to be descendent
of something monstrous, to still love the monster?
In this poem, it's a mention of a psychotherapist grandfather
who engaged in abusive procedures
on women diagnosed with floating uteruses.
In my reading, it's a question that
haunts my own awareness of the ways in which monstrosity might
emerge in any number of choices I might make attached
to the body I walk in as a trans-masculine, brown butch
dyke.
How do we all live with these attachments as estrangement,
these familial damnations onto our desires for wholeness,
for healing?
I think about this as I continue traveling through sam's verse.
In Erika's poem, "Hija de la chingada"--
[LAUGHTER]
--Erika writes a scene of familial dissonance,
the speaker in the poem receiving the disciplining that
falls often like cloud shadow over desert terrains.
A disciplining of the body, gender, and sex
of young brown Mexican girls in search of pleasure.
Mother pitted against daughter in search
of embodied comprehension, to be desired and to desire in return
as the mode of preferred resistance.
The scene of dissonance I find a personal resonance with
lives here in Erika's penetrating verse.
"Your ghost father sits on the couch cracking peanuts,
watching a Mexican game show, bugles and maracas,
and big-titted women dancing with a geriatric host."
Erika could be narrating my own upbringing,
as I stopped wondering why I was punished for imitating el cuchi
cuchi de Iris Chacón, when it was my father toxically
consuming her performance.
[SIGHS DEEPLY] Like you, I am permeating with excitement
to be in the audience tonight to follow the map points these two
preternaturally talented poets lay out for us as we wander
through the underworld of the self,
where we encounter shadowier parts of ourselves together,
where sex and death and taxes and truth come and bound
according to Erika Sánchez and sam sax.
Let's welcome them to Tucson.
[APPLAUSE]