Tres Abuelas Y Una Mamá: Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, Holly Iglesias, Maureen Seaton

Four nationally acclaimed and emerging poets from diverse backgrounds and generations merge to create a remarkable collaboration. Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, Holly Iglesias and Maureen Seaton call themselves “Tres abuelas y una mamá.” For two years these poets met once a week to tackle old and new ways of poetic experimentation. Through shared lines or shared themes, sonnets, pantoums, triptychs, and haibuns, this compilation takes on historical, civic, and domestic violence, mental health, and feminism. These masterful poems are political and existential, as well as intimate and spiritual. In an age of growing discord, this book’s transcendental force lies in its banded energy.

MYTH AMERICA

First grade ritual: the daily rosary

she runs hard and skips until the fall

bloody scrape rather than taking a knee.

She remembers the boy being forced to crawl

across the field while his papa looked away,

and her knee stinging down the hall.

She leans in, her silk sleeve against his cheek

as he in fealty — her champion, her swain —

lowers himself, back bent, demeanor meek.

She thinks: Kill me now, and hops a train

to a land where no one’s heard of chivalry

or helplessness: two sides of a fake coin.

On the gridiron he kneels, not to pray

but to jolt a nation long asleep.

She ascends without a stumble, leaps and slays.

— CH, NHM, HI, MS