All in by Ana Maria Caballero
by Ana María Caballero
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Please subscribe to SWWIM Every Dayto watch a daily video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
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Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Ana María Caballero, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 12 pm, Room 8303
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I bought the book at the airport in Bogotá and finished it on the flight
that carried me home, landing as another late season hurricane approached. A
tight book by the new French Noble, Ernaux.
The story is probably true, but the entire point is why must we ask. Sixty pages.
The brutal telling of a pitiless passion. Brutal because blunt. No lingerie.
No foreplay. Only the act. Its dry, spent language.
I left the book on the plane, every one of its verbs unmarked.
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Ana María Caballero is an award-winning literary artist whose work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites. She's the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and a Future Art Writers Award. She’s the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby’s and the first triple Lumen Prize finalist. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been published extensively and exhibited at venues like the Ashmolean Museum, the V&A Museum, and HEK Virtual, among others. The author of six books, she also co-founded digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse. See anamariacaballero.com.
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Permission granted by the poet.
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by Ana Maria Caballero
time
and small children
time
to think too much of
it
the child plays
you
squat and ruminate
time
disbursed as mother
apart
from yourself the child
wants
park with you only
you
you travel to park here
child
scrambles you ponder only
me
me but also them only
them
the other mothers who
smile
or do not it does not
matter
now now the minor
face
gapes down the major
slide
does not ask to be
caught
does not beckon
you
climb but you must
watch
for the slide to matter
is
the child right another
query
dashed at the
park
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Ana Maria Caballero was born in Miami in 1981 but grew up in Bogotá, Colombia. She’s a student of poetry at FIU, where she was runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 2014 her collection Entre domingo y domingo won Colombia's José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize. Finishing Line Press published Mid- life, her first chapbook, in 2016. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Tupelo Quarterly, Sundog Lit, and CutBank.
