[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Hey, everybody.
I want to really start by thanking the Poetry
Center, its staff, and donors for making the summer residency
program possible.
I know that the gift of uninterrupted time
doubles back to us in the form of art
and all the possibility that art opens.
It's my great honor to welcome to Tucson,
my friend, Angel Dominguez.
Angel is a Latinx poet and artist
of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood
and raised by their immigrant family in Van Nuys, California.
They're the author of Desgraciado:
(The Collected Letters) that came out
from Nightboat Books in 2022, as well
as the author of the poetry collections RoseSunWater
and Black Lavender Milk.
You can find Angel's words online
and in print in various publications,
including BOMB Magazine, the Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE,
Prolit magazine, SFMOMA's Open Space, and elsewhere.
But to really try to do my job here and make way
for Angel, what I want to remind us of
is that there are friends we meet if we're lucky,
whose resonance tilts the whole universe.
I met Angel in 2014 when my partner Susan Briante
and I got to co-teach a workshop at Naropa University's Summer
Writing Program.
I clearly remember at least two moments that summer
when I looked into Angel's eyes and experienced
a sudden expansion of my awareness, where I could almost
feel other points in the space time matrix
hover around my head points where Angel and I had
been 1-- or 1 day will be.
The effect is like thinking you're educated
and knowing that the earth revolves around the sun,
but then seeing the animated graphic that
shows the sun itself orbits the milky way,
that the planet's elliptical orbits are
in fact dynamic spirals, and that the whole menagerie is
cast out in a trajectory that always eventually doubles back.
The discipline of literature can make
art feel as static as that old model of the solar system.
But Angel sets us in motion through lyric, epistolary,
and narrative forms.
Across those modes, Angel's work travels
tonal registers with associative lyrics that can articulate
irreconcilable mystery.
While in other moments, their work
can speak almost against lyric with a clarity and brevity
that can deliver what Bruce Lee called the One-Inch Punch.
And Angel's work spirals through space time off the page
as well, expanding into performance art, ritual,
and song writing.
Taken together, the ways Angel's work orients me
to the spiraling universe makes me
think we won't just write our way out
of this era of global boiling as the UN has called it.
Angel's work makes me think that the book might matter
a little less than the social relations and rituals
around the book.
In other words, it's 2023.
Aliens are real, gender is not.
Fascism is real, money is not.
And yet somehow, we're still taking
turns standing behind a podium?
[LAUGHTER]
Instead, Angel helps us dream of gathering around a border
patrol or police station, for instance,
reading poems that might help state agents
realize property and borders are far less
real than the resonance of word and body, time, and space.
Please welcome Angel Dominguez.
[APPLAUSE]