Chapina Poetry in Conversation

http://www.acentosreview.com/November2013/gabriela-ramirez-chavez.html

Check out these poems by Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez. I recently met her at a talk by a mentor of mine visiting Berkeley. She mentioned that she wrote a poem inspired by my poetry but I had no idea.  Being mentioned in someone else’s poem is intense because I think my poems only exist in my little world or are part of the past, a poet I used to be. Then I read the first two poems  of hers published in The Acentos Review and could barely catch my breath at their beauty and ferocity. Then I read the third and my heart split open. Wow. Just wow. I swear I just met her. That poem was written before we met but we met through the written word and  have been in “conversation” since before we met. We are truly all related.

Dear Gabriela, I’m going to tell you what a Guatemalan writer once said to me in the middle of a restaurant in Mexico City sometime in the mid 90’s after I told him what it was like to be living in diaspora en el otro lado del otro lado:

“Que bueno que exitís, vos. Necesitamos de tus palabras.”

I am truly humbled.

Take a look at her work and of the others published in The Acentos Review. 

I’m still working on the book but maybe someday I will submit some of my poems again like the poets do. 😉