Luisa A. Igloria

Author: Luisa A. Igloria

Poet Luisa A. Igloria (website) is the 2023 Immigrant Writing Series prize winner for Caulbearer: Poems (due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2024), and Co-Winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition in Poetry for Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, September 2020). She was appointed Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia for 2020-22, and in 2021 received 1 of 23 Poet Laureate Fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation. She is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015; she also teaches classes at The Muse Writers' Center in Norfolk. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.

December 20, 2010November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Scherenschnitte

This entry is part 7 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

On otherwise lifeless
tansy stalks, a green sprig
and a single yolk-

colored bloom. Snowflakes
drift past: far-flung voyagers,
their exile brief, their nostalgia

cut and crystalled with salt.
Harbor me in cold earth,
my winter lover. I long

for home most of all
when small birds come
to forage for seed

and light sieves
through cracks
in stones.

—Luisa A. Igloria
12.18.2010

Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 4.

December 19, 2010November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Aubade, with Feathers

This entry is part 6 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

Because we’ve loved,
the soft calls and dark
moving forms of sparrows

at dawn seem covert,
even illicit— Furtive
like some joys

tasted on the wing,
keen in their retreat
as any bladed thing.

—Luisa A. Igloria
12.17.2010

Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 17.

December 18, 2010November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

With winter’s gift of unimpeded sight,

This entry is part 5 of 95 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2010-11

I watch crows circle a dark carcass
a hundred yards off through the woods.
Only this white backdrop could make
bearable, the way the elements
have chosen whatever’s returned
as offering to the wheel. In spring
or summer we’ll come across its bones
under new growth of grass, bleached
white as stars that filter light
all this way through nets of trees.

—Luisa Igloria
12.16.2010

Borrowing lines from the Morning Porch entry for December 13.

December 15, 2010November 20, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria