Lenna Mendoza - AS LIGHTNING

Brazos welcomes Texas-born poet Lenna Mendoza on November 16 with her debut poetry collection As Lightning. Lenna will be in conversation with Analicia Sotelo.Highlighting the prominent and contradictory place children occupy in Western culture, where they are at once cherished and reviled, As Lightning interrogates the nature of childhood itself. Offering multiple pathways through her own past via unexpected means—tests, riddles, word searches, rhyme, and a tour-de-force grouping of choose-your-own-adventure poems—Lenna Mendoza reveals the inherent pitfalls of imposing a narrative on a life. In a paean to “the stuffed puppy I won’t leave,” she deftly observes, “we can hold more than we think.” This collection traces one multiracial queer girl’s experiences of identity, sexuality, trauma, race, gender, and the body itself, in vibrations and resonances that reconfigure these lenses of self-awareness and the limits of our understanding. Advance praise:“A wondrous debut. Composed with cunning diction and surprise, the poems move with and beyond form: sometimes quietly and sometimes full of thunder.”—Jake Skeets“In manic, addictive rhyme, As Lightning upends ideas of innocence, revealing childhood to be a dangerous, haunted land, shining nonetheless from spilled ultrafine glitter. Mendoza navigates form with an engineer’s precision and an uncanny, prophetic vision. An essential book about girlhood and survival.”—Melissa GinsburgLenna Mendoza is a poet from Texas living in Tucson, Arizona. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Quarterly West, Passages North, Four Way Review, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Analicia Sotelo is the author of Virgin, the inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, selected by Ross Gay. She is also the author of the chapbook Nonstop Godhead, selected by Rigoberto González for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, the Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston.