Virgin: Poems

By Analicia Sotelo and Ross Gay

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. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781571319777

Book preview

Do You Speak Virgin?

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 & 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

& the stars are 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, hides

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 & salt

& 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 & the sight of him

fleeing to the car

once he sees how far & wide,

how dark & deep

this frigid female mind can go.

TASTE

Summer Barbecue with Two Men

Tonight, the moon looks like Billie Holiday, trembling

because there are problems other people have

& now I have them, too.

I’m wearing a cherry-colored cardigan over

a navy print dress, on