I Was a Bell

by M. Soledad Caballero

Overview

*Winner of the 2021 International Association of Authoethnography and Narrative Inquiry Award for Outstanding Book*

*GOLD MEDALIST in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English*

In this collection, Caballero imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present. These poems interweave an early childhood lived in another country and in another language with experiences of immigration and family histories in the United States. They create connections between a child’s naïve perspective of dictatorship and an adult perspective informed by bodily illness and political knowledge. Ultimately, Caballero traces a lineage of memory, exploring how present moments unearth the past that ripples through them. This collection does not reconcile the past and the present. Instead, these poems remind us that how we ask questions about ourselves, our histories, and our bodies is what creates our identities, our traumas, and our future hopes and possibilities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597094900
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

M. Soledad Caballero is a professor of English at Allegheny College. Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, postcolonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, has been a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffry E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry, the Mississippi Review’s annual Editors’ prize, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her poem “Myths We Tell” won the 2019 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize for Cutthroat: a Journal of the Arts. She is a co-recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Connections Grant, as well as a Great Lakes Colleges Association Expanding Collaborations Initiative Grant. Her first poetry collection won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award sponsored by Red Hen Press. Caballero splits her time between Meadville and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Bird Girl

Losing Spanish 17

Birds of Prey 19

Immigration Office, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1985 21

What Remains Buried 24

Ode to My Hair 27

The Spell 28

Alien Magic 30

La Doncella 32

Before Intersectionality 34

Bird Girl 35

To the Boys Who Bully My Nephew in Sixth Grade 36

My English Decades 38

Memory Spaces 39

Waiting for the Horsemen

To Document 49

When You Go Out to Walk the Dog 50

In the Time of the Patriarch 51

Villa Grimaldi 52

What It Takes 53

Forerunner 54

Waiting for the Horsemen 56

What You Are Doing Is Living 57

Flight 58

I Was a Bell

Pacific Dreams 65

Rebellion 66

The Generals of South America 67

In the Poison Time There Is Love 68

Someday I Will Visit Hawk Mountain 70

After the Election: A Father Speaks to His Son 71

Immigrant Confession 72

I Was a Bell 73

Flight Plan

The Order of Things 79

Relics 80

Marriage 83

Twelve-Hour Shift 84

You Have to Leave Me Twice 85

A Love Story 86

Flight Plan 87

My Yellow Heart 89

Confessions 91

Cells 92

Rooted 93

Editorial Reviews

"Caballero bears unflinching witness to the emotional trauma inherited from war-ravaged Chile to the exiled plains of Oklahoma. As though to witness is to love. These poems negotiate the transitions of language, memory, country, her battle with cancer, counterbalancing the violence from which she fled with a transformative devotion to details."—Richard Blanco, fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet

“I Was a Bell is a triumph, a gutting cry of love and longing for all that migration sows and uproots in the survivors of exile. In retracing her family’s story of leaving Chile under Pinochet to 1980s Oklahoma, M. Soledad Caballero gives soaring voice to the ways history, memory, and the collective weight of our disappeared lives silenced, but never unheard, in our bodies and hearts. It’s hard to express how much these poems made unnamed parts of me feel seen.”—Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home and Chasing the Sun

"Caballero uses the English language and the language of a cancer diagnosis and breathes life into them." —Pittburgh City Paper

"Caballero explores memory, war in Chile, and immigration to the U.S. in a deeply personal and touching way." —Latino Stories

"Caballero’s writing is conversational yet lyrical, mixing English and Spanish, its short sentences holding vast amounts of beauty and pain." —TuftsNow

From the Publisher