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Frank Mundo

Book Review

Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi

by on October 28, 2024

The premise alone of “Quarantine Highway,” (Flowersong Press, Oct. 2022) the latest collection of poetry by Millicent Borges Accardi, is well worth the price of admission ‒ which is only about $16 right now on the Flowersong Press website.

The 68-poem collection, written during the early and mid-months of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, records and examines the shared sense of fear, isolation and uncertainty that many of us nonessential workers, forced to socially distance, would experience for up to a year or more of working from home, home schooling or just sheltering in place.

The book itself emerged from a 30-by-30 writing challenge put to past and present CantoMundistas, AKA fellows of CantoMundo, a national poetry organization since 2009 who, according to its website, “cultivates a community of Latinx poets through workshops, symposia, public readings, and publications.” Accardi’s work here, intentional artifacts, were prompted by readings and themes influenced and initiated by this tightknit literary community who met regularly on Zoom to challenge, collaborate, inspire each other, and to help confront and navigate their forced isolation together with their shared love of poetry and reading, and the healing and safety of their strong connections (personally, professionally, and digitally). What a magnificent experiment and premise for a book of poetry!

One of my favorite poems in the book is “Bread,” which not only sets the stage for the dreaded “new normal” of our world plus social distancing, but it also highlights the vivid imagery, repetition, and surprising wordplay that feature in the best of Accardi’s work throughout the book.

In “Bread,” the speaker opens by telling us what we already “know, knew / know, known…”; that it was all just a big gamble, just a bet we all made “hoping for a last breaking of luck / before the world ran out.” Do you remember making that same bet before braving empty-shelved grocery stores, armed with only “sanitizer and hope,” trying to stock up on anything and everything (even toilet paper) our families might possibly need before “…life was forbidden and / everyone was an enemy”? Because I sure do.

This poem also brings up other important themes explored throughout the book: rampant misinformation from the media, new levels of political upheaval, and the growing divide (both physically and politically) between us and them.

“We were television-glued / as news rolled by and the rooms / misled us into doing the nonsense / we knew we shouldn’t:/ over-drinking, board games, /chanting curses at each other.”

Accardi’s use of first-person plural here, and in many of the subsequent poems in this collection, is a bold choice that clearly demonstrates, to me, the poet’s intention, despite its subject matter, to push past this hate in the time of the ‘rona to a much healthier and more productive place of hope, healing, self-reflection and the reckoning we all so sorely needed.

Listen to “Bread” read by the author

In “Bread,” a familiar cadence or rhythm also recalled for me the opening bit to T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” – and, considering the subject matter, it makes a lot of sense now. Accardi’s word choice and placement of “breaking…” “betting…” “binding…” and “bleeding” echoes the “breeding…” “mixing…” “stirring…” and “feeding…”  from Eliot’s seminal Modernist work. And this was just one of many poems in the book that had me Googling other poets and books for hours and hours as I willingly dove down into literary rabbit holes of inspired reading and learning.

I talked to Accardi about “Bread,” and how much I liked it and all the allusions to other poets and their work. I shared with her that, for me, poetry has always been a kind of cosmic conversation between poets over time and space – and that this mystical feeling came over me quite a bit while I was reading her book and all the amazing writers her work references. I asked about her own objectives or goals when it came to writing her poetry.

“I write to try to make sense of the world,” she said, “to piece things
together in my own mind. I write to learn and to research. I write to
keep me sane.”

She told me, whether she was ranting or mumbling, celebrating or complaining, her writing is about vocalizing change and starting a conversation that could, ultimately, effect change.

I should point out that not all the poems in “Quarantine Highway” are specifically about COVID-19, like “Bread.” In fact, most of the poems, as part of the 30-by-30 writing challenge, are direct responses, written under the specter of the global pandemic, to specific poetry prompts: words, phrases or titles of poems, books, and songs.

In the second half of the book, the poet also takes on one of COVID-19’s favorite targets: immigrants and immigration. A proud Portuguese American, Accardi examines her own heritage in much of her writing, and “Quarantine Highway” is no different, especially themes concerning the loss, discovery, claiming, and reclaiming of identity.

In “With Cascading, Iron Straight Hair,” we get all three of the book’s interesting elements in one playful yet poignant poem about a young immigrant teen’s cultural assimilation. “Slathering on lye from an orange jar…” to straighten out her “Portuguese Frizz waves…” in “a divorce of emotions between what /” she sees in the locker and who she sees far away “in the pages of Seventeen magazine…” which the poet calls “a catalogue of friends…” she “could never connect with…”

Composed after a line from “Heirlooms” by Luivette Resto, a Puerto Rican poet and CantoMundo fellow, this piece offers a hopeful “ever-present relief” from what seems a painful personal moment, a “charm of sweet conflict…” as true as true can be.

In “Unlearning America’s Languages” (on a theme by, “Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps” by Sheryl Luna), another seemingly young voice tells us how her own generation “…form-fitted into a dress of forgetting / language culture, food, Fit in Fit in Fit in / disappear into America…” We learn that their “Parents came to California to rise above / blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm…” Finally, the poem ends with devastating (yet still hopeful) image that left me shook and shaken like one of our infamous LA tremors:

            “…Tell the counselors you will ride the bus
                and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future
                that does not resemble any past you heard whispered
                and fought about at night after bedtime, where
                we lie in bed and draw words in the air, spelling
                out where we came from.

This book easily could’ve taken a much darker turn were it not for that bit of hope in this and other insightful poems in the collection. Accardi made sure to remind us throughout the book that, while hope may be free, real change has a very high and very real cost – it’s the pain, struggle, the fight, the fear, the anxiety, the potential and actual loss of identity, of self, of life, of limb, and of who we are and where we might and might not Fit in Fit in Fit in  the world. Most importantly, we see that change, while often imperceptibly slow in the real world, can possibly accelerate through self-reflection, creativity, community, compassion, generosity, art, music, and – dammit, yes – the wise words of poetry!

I asked Accardi who influenced her writing and this hopeful view of her art. I was not surprised when her short list was made up of mostly educators and librarians, her parents and her amazing fellow fellows at CantoMundo. But there was one name on the list that really got my attention: Mrs. Virtue, her first-grade teacher.

Mrs. Virtue wasn’t just any teacher; she was that teacher for Accardi, the one who really left her mark. “Her dad was a poet,” Accardi said, “and she read us poems in class which I am sure were not part of the curriculum.” It turns out Mrs. Virtue’s dad wasn’t just any old poet. Her dad was Claude McKay, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

I couldn’t help but recall a poem about Mrs. Virtue in “Quarantine Highway” called “The Truth would be from a Line” (inspired by Gastão Cruz) that I now knew I’d misread, and which I suddenly realized, I’d clearly misinterpreted as well.

Mrs. Virtue wasn’t a poetic personification of virtue or even some positive educator in general; she was an actual and important person from the poet’s real life. The poem discusses “…an old phrase, / like a poem dealing with / trees I memorized, along with everyone / else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade [class] / at Luther Burbank…” This line, which would “…require / more sense than this crazy crisis / we are going through presently…” was the truth – the whole truth:

            “For truth would have
              to be untouchable,
              like a hand we used to know,
              to hold –
              as if it were our own –
              the left reaching
              for the right, fumbling along thru
              this magnificent universe we kind of
              know, or at least pretended it to be so.”

This was interesting to me because, while I was reading “Quarantine Highway” for this review, my 8-year-old daughter, struck by the colorful cover art by Ralph Almeida, asked me what the book I was reading was about. I told her it was a poetry book written during the pandemic, which captured her attention. The pandemic is easily the biggest historical event of her young life so far. So, we talked about that difficult time for a little while when she suddenly asked me a question I didn’t know how to answer. Is poetry fiction or non-fiction?  

I brought this up to Accardi, and she agreed that it might be an impossible question to answer properly, especially to my 8-year-old daughter. She then recalled how surprised she was one day when she went looking for poetry books at the Alamitos Library in Long Beach, her home-away-from-home as a child and discovered that the poetry books were stored in the non-fiction section. “Poetry was deep in the trenches between biographies and chemistry,” she said. “It made no sense to me.”

In the end, neither of us was sure which was which. And while Accardi gave me an answer for me to share with my daughter, I think I should end this review by sharing that answer here as well. Not only because I like her answer, but because I think it accurately represents what “Quarantine Highway,” the latest poetry collection by Millicent Borges Accardi is really about.

“My final answer is both,” she said. “With poetry, we write about
the truth that is sometimes too painful to speak or mention unless
it is couched in fairy tales, made-up characters, and lessons learned
by strangers, so as not to harm the innocent and to make the
truth easier to take.”


Quarantine Highway by Millicent Borges Accardi is available now from Flowersong Press.

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).

Book Review

Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma by Sonia Gutiérrez

by on June 11, 2024

Review by Frank Mundo:

When I received “Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma,” the latest poetry collection by bilingual writer and poet Sonia Gutiérrez from El Martillo Press (April 2024), I was surprised by its unusual heft. 180 pages is quite a lot these days for a poetry collection by a single artist. Turns out, however, the high page count is a direct result of the book’s unique presentation – at least, it’s a format I’d never seen before. Not only bilingual, some of the poems are also described as “interlingual” in the book’s introduction by Mexican writer Susana Bautista Cruz. Interlingual is the relationship between two languages, which, in this case, refers to the natural, multicultural (and inevitable?) mashup of English and Spanish by Latinos and Chicano Americans into, essentially, a “new” language known as Spanglish.

Divided into three sections, the book presents 14, 12, and 14 bilingual poems, respectively, each one printed side-by-side, first in English and then in Spanish. A smaller selection of Spanglish versions of the poems, translated in this collection by bilingual poet and musician Francisco J. Bustos, are shared after that. Offering these poems in all three languages this way is interesting to me and, I would argue, an empowering poetic exercise and experience for fluent readers and speakers of any of these languages. In the third section, there’s also a single bilingual short story called, “Teresa and the Birds Inside,” which is Gutiérrez’ take on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” except her version takes place at a DMV in San Diego with a broken A/C and which is possibly haunted by what seems to be a flock of horrible screeching birds. Finally, several illustrations and other bonus features help fill out the book’s 180 pages, including the bilingual versions of the introduction, acknowledgments, and a helpful discussion guide for book clubs and educators.

My favorite piece in the book is “The Giver of Poems,” a beautiful and vivid homage to the prolific Chicano poet and educator Francisco X. Alarcón, who, with insight and compassion, explored in his writing important themes in Latino and gay identity, mythology, the Nahuatl language, Mesoamerican history, and American culture. In “The Giver of Poems,” there’s a sense of peace and clarity, but also a playful tone that seems apropos. The speaker of the poem is experiencing an inspiring and lucid or “woken” dream, where the unnamed Giver of Poems, perhaps Alarcón himself, awakens “on white / sheets of paper” in a sky full of “luminous letters.” Using his hands, he “kneads words / forming clouds / made of poems.” Don’t sleep on the wordplay here with knead and need. This joyful little literary moment pays off later when The Giver takes a break, of all things, “and goes up the stairs / of a giant / uppercase A” until “laughing and smiling,” he “goes down its slide” with his arms “wide open.” I can’t help but smile picturing Alarcón, who Gutiérrez calls her Chicano role model and Literary Saint, on a break from making clouds into poems with his bare hands, only to slide down the slope of an upper-case letter A with his arms in the air.

Listen to Sonia Gutiérrez reading the “Poema Giver” para–Francisco X. Alarcón, the Spanglish version of “The Giver of Poems.”

 

I asked Gutiérrez about her homage to Alarcón and how he became such a major influence in her work and her life. “His poetry is medicina,” she told me. His work “allows us to look at the Mexican American (the Chicano) experience through a historical context.” Like so many of us do, Gutierrez got her poetry legs in an Intro to Poetry course in school, unearthing poetry gems from that giant Norton poetry anthology. These excavated poets would serve as her “professors and teachers” at that time, helping her recognize what poetry is, what it looks like, and what it could do and be. She told me that’s why she teaches Alarcón’s work sometimes in her own college classrooms, so her students can discover and experience his work, too. She also said she liked how Alarcón told fellow poets often that he didn’t write poems, “he wrote tattoos,” which was the title of his first poetry collection. She admired the way he composed poetry against convention without capitalizing words and using periods, and the meaning he shared behind this creative choice ‒ that the period, he said, would come at the end.  

In “Bones Speak,” another nod to Alarcón and his multicolumn poem, Gutiérrez offers a “tattoo” of her own. According to the book’s Notes section, Alarcón says the columns of poems are “like copal smoke signals.” And since “Bones Speak” is also one of the works selected for Spanglish translation by Bustos, we get to experience the full power of this triple-column collaborative composition, with all three versions, side-by-side on one page, one in each column – and wow! It’s a stunning example of poetic expression. 

But this collection is more than an homage to Alarcón or to bilingual or even interlingual poetry. Timely stories, histories, narratives, dreams, and testimonies explore subjects in themes of human, environmental, social, and cultural dignity. Before reading the book, I asked Gutiérrez about her writing and what readers might expect. “Ever since I was a child,” she told me, “my way of seeing the world has always been through a lens of social justice.” So, years later, when Gutiérrez discovered poetry and started writing her own poems, it made sense that she would write about the issues that, as a poet, needed to be addressed.

“I’m a poet concerned about humanity,” she said. “I’m a poet concerned

with the environment. A poet that would like for people to have dialogical communication about pressing issues. Anything that needs to be addressed

we should have the ability to discuss.”

In “Testimony of a Tree,” we get just that, a firsthand account of what it’s like to be the trees along Highway 805 in San Diego, who “had wished their lives / on the superhighway / would always be green.” Interestingly, the first three of the four stanzas of this scathing environmental poem are offered in first-person plural: “but nobody asked us / why one day we turned pale, / our bark fell and arms / went bare.” The final stanza, however, switches to first-person singular – a foreman, perhaps? A delegated representative? Maybe the star witness, who knows? Either way, in the final stanza of this testimony, we get our grass absolutely handed to us: “What I do know is we never / dreamed of living next to / burning black asphalt / breathing in the sulfuric waste / of humanity away from the birds / and bees…”

In “Neither Rooster, Nor Bird, Nor Human,” we learn what things are by what they are not – starting and ending with the rooster, the bird, and the human. A very short piece, it’s even shorter on forgiveness – and the last stanza will stay with me for a long time. Looking now in the book, I see that I circled this stanza because I knew I’d need to come back to it later: “A human is not a human; / he is an inhumane animal, / killing the Earth / with his utter will.”

In “An American Landscape,” we visit that “chilly February night / under a star-spangled sky…” where Trayvon Martin “…stayed warm / fastened like a monk…” or what some called a thug, in his hoodie.

“The Indictment of Index Fingers and Thumbs,” is an indictment of our justice system in America. It opens with the poet, standing before “Judge Justice…” who is examining the six index fingers and six thumbs that facilitated the shooting deaths of Charles Smith, John Crawford III, Micheal Brown, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, and India Kager. “Who pulled the trigger?” the Judge asks, and the fingers and thumbs, “Dumbfounded and with white knees…” “…pointed at the firearms…”

In “Bakr Red Petals on a Beach,” Gutiérrez addresses the four children from the Bakr family, ages 9-12, who were killed by a missile from the Israeli naval force on the fishing beach west of Gaza City: “With bull’s-eye precision / on an open shore / Flower Killers came to Gaza…”

“The Colors of Death” personifies Fukushima and grills her about the nuclear accident that poisoned the ocean and displaced at least 164,000 people: “Ask Fukushima / if she drank clean water / this morning.”

Finally, in “Eulogy for Súper Pancho from the Land of Maiz,” one of the longest poems in the collection, the poet responds to Donald Trump’s painful and unfair statements about Mexicans during his presidential announcement speech in 2016. Súper Pancho, our brave hero, with his “corn-tortilla cape” and shovel, “his super weapon,” is paired against Mr. Liberty Mouth, who’s “snarling mouth” spews “torture words.” There’s a nice black-and-white illustration of Súper Pancho whose “tamale arms / and legs don’t hide / from the scorching sun / to sell diamond-faced / watches nor does he build / golden hotel skyscrapers, / reaching for the Green / Dollar God.”

There are so many standout and outstanding poems in this collection that it’s difficult to choose which ones to highlight and which ones to neglect. I had a similar reaction or experience a couple years ago when I read “Dreaming with Mariposas,” Gutiérrez’ debut novel from Flowersong Press. Made up of vignettes (mostly 1-3 pages), we follow the coming-of-age of two sisters, butterflies in a family of dreamers in So-Cal during the late 70s and 80s. For most of the book, I honestly thought I was reading her memoir because the details were so rich and real and accurate.

I asked Gutiérrez if she had a goal or objective when writing poetry. “When my poem is in front of someone and they’re reading it,” she said, “my goal is that they’re moved, that they’re looking at the world through a lens or a perspective they had never contemplated before.”

She also said there was a quote in the letters of Emily Dickinson that really summed up her objective when it comes to writing poetry:

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me,
I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken
off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any
other way?”

In English, Spanish, or even Spanglish, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Paper Birds: Feather by Feather / Pájaros de papel: Pluma por pluma is available now from El Martillo Press.  

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).

Book Review

City on the Second Floor

by on March 29, 2022

Poetry by Matt Sedillo
Review by Frank Mundo

I was watching Disney’s “Encanto” with the kids when the mail arrived with Matt Sedillo’s new book of poetry, “City on the Second Floor” from FlowerSong Press, and I thought, how perfect is that? Here’s Matt Sedillo, extremely popular Chicano political poet, essayist, activist (the hardest working poet I know) – and yet somehow he’s become like the Bruno of certain parts of the Los Angeles poetry scene. His poetry superpower is so electric and engaging that most are absolutely dazzled and inspired by his voice, while the rest are left frightened (even triggered) and dismissive of his ostensibly dark and angry premonitions. Plus, he’s a troll, they say. He’s a communist with Das Kapital C. He’s (God forbid) a renegade. Self-taught? He didn’t even go to college.

Maybe that’s why, despite all he’s done for the poetry community in Los Angeles for a dozen years or so, we haven’t seen even a mention of Sedillo (or his three books) in the LA Times since he won the L.A. Grand Slam championship in 2011. Perhaps that’s why, no matter how hard he works and finds success, he’s never been the poet in conversation at Rattle. And, maybe it’s why, like his second book, “Mowing Leaves of Grass,” his newest book will likely never be reviewed or discussed by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Maybe it’s just me, but, in certain parts of Los Angeles, it seems we don’t talk about Matt Sedillo – at least, not nearly as much as we should. And I just don’t understand why. Many compare him to Amiri Baraka, Jose Montoya, and so many other fiery or political poets. To me, his work is a cross between Allen Ginsberg and Wanda Coleman. So why isn’t everyone in LA talking about his new book, “City on the Second Floor,” which is flying off the shelves, by the way.

One criticism you’ll hear way too often is that Sedillo’s poetry is too angry. This is a lazy and shallow reading (or listening) of his work. Yes, there is anger in his poetry, and a lot of it, but it’s almost always tempered with humor, which can never be done effectively without empathy and compassion. Sedillo’s speaker addresses this idea in “Post,” the very first poem of the 32 poems and one play collected in “City on the Second Floor.” And I can almost guarantee that Sedillo or his publisher placed this piece first in the collection intentionally. There’s no way this was a coincidence.

“Post” begins looking back (even reminiscing, you might say) to a time of the service economy (when what? America was great?) – “…just like yesterday/ Municipalities raised cities/ Built nuclear families/ Associations of sturdy pockets/ A two-car garage, chicken in every pot.” What follows is their broken promise of tomorrow, “…which doesn’t show up all at once,” the speaker tells us, “But when it does…” it’s with liquidated pensions and automated factories – and the resulting gig economy left in a shambles to a generation who “…cannot afford to live in…” the very cities where they must hustle only to get part-time, freelance, contract, and “adjunct” employment. “Promise me the world, then show me the door,” Sedillo’s speaker concludes. “I was not/ Born/ Angry/ I was abandoned.”

Yet, even with that last line, as justifiable as the “anger” might be for this speaker (and Sedillo’s generation), I think a lot of critics who only want to see anger will miss the fabulous punchline at the end of the poem – “Tell me the one/ Where I killed the economy.”

I love this line, not only because it’s hilarious, but because it’s so accurate. Often accused of being whiners and lazy, Millennials are also blamed somehow for ruining the very broken economy they inherited. But I would argue that there’s nothing overly angry in this line. This is not an “OK, Boomer” sarcastic snowflake moment. This is more of a mic-drop moment – a humorous wink and a nod to the “us” in the us-versus-them structure that makes up so much of Sedillo’s poetry.

Even the title “Post” is a funny play on words of old versus new. Is this the postindustrial standard? Is this a letter? A social media post? Is this a signpost? Or is it a warning, like so many other poems in the collection about how consumerism, credit, and debt will ruin us all? Maybe it’s all these things and a hint of what to expect in the following pages of an angry and funny and compassionate collection.
Sedillo reworks this poem later in the book (sort of in reverse) in a poem called, “Hammurabi,” which is laugh-out-loud funny. This one ends with a deadly serious punchline, “Since they from on high/ Convinced us down below/ That we/ Ever/ Needed/ Their/ Code/ Of law/ To tell us/ We were free.” What’s funny is that the lies about the future in this remix of “Post” come from the TV characters we so loved and trusted: Lucy Ricardo, Mr. Belvedere, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, and especially Al Bundy (all comedies, mind you) who convinced us that we “…could raise a family/ In a two story/ On the single income/ Of a shoe salesman.” LOL.

I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t the only one who believed Matt Sedillo’s poetry is as funny as it is angry. Maybe I just have a dark sense of humor. So, I called up Mike “the Poet” Sonksen, a poet, scholar, journalist, critic, mentor, and author with an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of poetry in Los Angeles. I respect Mike’s opinion so much because he focuses on poetry of merit, not simply the styles and genres he prefers. If anyone anywhere in LA is writing or “spitting” quality verse, he knows about it, writes about it, talks about – because he’s all about it and has been for 25 years.

“Matt Sedillo is relentless,” Mike told me. “He’s a student of history and skilled at spinning his astute understanding into engaging poetry,” and I couldn’t agree more. He also said, “Sedillo can also be quite funny, satirizing the powers that be with poetic one-liners. His social commentary balances truth and wit to produce a poetic velocity faster than Starsky & Hutch.”

Another poem I loved from the book, “Pope of Broadway,” literally starts as a classic joke: “An Arab, an Italian, a Jew, a Puerto Rican, an Inuit, an American Indian, a Mongolian/ And a Mexican/ Walk into a bar…” and “Anthony Quinn orders a drink.” This is a wonderful and complex poem about the “ethnically ambiguous” actors (the “every” Brown-man) in Hollywood, from Quinn (who was the best) to today’s other “two first-name” actors who continue this unusual tradition today, including Cliff Curtis and Oscar Isaac.

I like this poem also because I spoke about this concept (and the larger and darker meaning behind it) with Matt Sedillo a couple years ago, before he had written the piece. And reading the final product in his new book was a real treat for me.

That day, I also asked Matt what his goal was when writing a poem. “First,” he said, “it’s to satisfy the demands of structure.” Matt often uses a three-act structure that he has developed and refined over the years and made his own. It’s one of the major topics he discusses and often teaches as a highly in-demand speaker/performer at the top colleges and universities in America and at several other major venues in Canada, England, and Cuba. “Second,” Matt continued, “no matter what the theme is, I want to write poems (not every time, but I try) that are calls to action.” It’s not surprising to me that his answer is all about craft. Matt sees craft everywhere. He studies it and looks for patterns and anomalies in everything. He’ll read texts or study videos of fiery speakers, like Hugo Chavez and Michael Parenti, and spend hours breaking down their prose, examining what they say and how they say it. He’ll study the timing of stand-up comics, books, films, commercials, anything that tells stories in an engaging way that gets people to act.

In “Mowing Leaves of Grass,” Sedillo’s first book with FlowerSong Press from 2019, his craft, especially his three-act structure is in full effect. It’s the work that put him on the map as a unique and powerful voice in Los Angeles and beyond. The poems in his latest book, “City on the Second Floor,” however, offer a glimpse, I believe, of where his poetry is headed: even more powerful, political, angry, funny, timely, smart, carefully crafted, and compassionate calls to action.

I also asked Matt Sedillo who influences him and his writing, and I was a little surprised by his answer. An avid student of history, Matt listed artists who are still alive and very active in the community. He said Luis J. Rodriguez, the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. He also mentioned other poets whose work inspired him: spoken word artist David A. Romero, author of “My Name is Romero,” and Viva Padilla, Publisher/ Editor-in-Chief of Dryland, a literary journal.

Finally, I wanted to know about Matt Sedillo’s publisher, so I contacted Edward Vidaurre, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of FlowerSong Press, and I asked him straight out why he chose to publish such an outspoken and, perhaps, controversial poet as Matt Sedillo. Without hesitation, Vidaurre answered, “Because, like me, he is fearless about his work. He’s a necessary voice in a world where being an activist is sometimes looked on as trouble.” Finally, he added – and it all made perfect sense to me – “I wanted his collection to make noise and open eyes.”

I suppose the gatekeepers and kingmakers of the Los Angeles literary scene will do what they want to do – and they still might not talk about Matt Sedillo after my little plea here. But, with Sedillo’s incredible work ethic, his determination and dedication to craft, and his fearless and supportive publisher’s commitment to sharing “necessary” voices and books, I know we will definitely be hearing much more “noise” from him.



City on the Second Floor is available now from FlowerSong Press.

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).