Virgin: Poems

by Analicia Sotelo, Ross Gay (Selected by)

Overview

Selected by Ross Gay as winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize, Analicia Sotelo’s debut collection of poems is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman.

In Virgin, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and mythmaking, offering up identities like dishes at a feast. These poems devour and complicate tropes of femininity—of naiveté, of careless abandon—before sharply exploring the intelligence and fortitude of women, how “far & wide, / how dark & deep / this frigid female mind can go.” A schoolgirl hopelessly in love. A daughter abandoned by her father. A seeming innocent in a cherry-red cardigan, lurking at the margins of a Texas barbeque. A contemporary Ariadne with her monstrous Theseus. A writer with a penchant for metaphor and a character who thwarts her own best efforts. “A Mexican American fascinator.”

At every step, Sotelo’s poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail—grilled meat, golden habañeros, and burnt sugar—before delivering clear-eyed and eviscerating insights into power, deceit, relationships, and ourselves. Here is what it means to love someone without truly understanding them. Here is what it means to be cruel. And here is what it means to become an artist, of words and of the self.

Blistering and gorgeous, Virgin is an audacious act of imaginative self-mythology from one of our most promising young poets. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571319777
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	08/10/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Analicia Sotelo is the author of Nonstop Godhead, which was selected by Rigoberto González for a 2016 Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. Her poem “I’m Trying to Write a Poem About a Virgin and It’s Awful” was selected for Best New Poets 2015 by Tracy K. Smith. Her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Iowa Review. She earned her MFA from the University of Houston and works for Writers in the Schools in Houston.

Read an Excerpt

SUMMER BARBECUE WITH TWO MEN

Tonight, the moon looks like Billie Holiday, trembling
because there are problems other people have
& now I have them, too.

I’m wearing a cherry-colored cardigan over
a navy print dress, on purpose.
People think I’m sweet.

I try the Ancho chile pork ribs, in case
the man I once wanted might still
rub off on me.

I wonder if I’ll ever know about flavors, what
tastes right. In the overheated kitchen,
I chat briefly with a series of

30-something-year old men--all slender, all
bearded, lustful to the point of sullen.
I hug&compliment

their pretty, female partners as a way of saying,
I am beautiful in my harmlessness!
Outside, people.

A circle of party chairs. I don’t care much
for a stranger’s guacamole. The man
I once wanted is grilling

these beautiful peaches. He offers some--
I’m embarrassed. I try not
to touch his hand.

I try to touch his hand. On the porch,
another man I know is kissing
the shoulder of a woman

whose fiancée is here somewhere. Guess what,
he says. You’re the only one who cares.
I wouldn’t have guessed:

Judgment is a golden habañero margarita
with wings, wet&cold
on his chest. So

many people are tender from the right angle.
I’m hungry&confused. I love
a good barbecue. Save me.

* * *

Summer Seminar

In this minor emergency of the self,
we drink to become confused,
to swim in the dark like idiot fish.

This is a lake at night in a forest.

This is where we look up at the stains
in the sky and someone says, It’s purpling out here,
and someone else says, Someone write that down.

We’re all performing our bruises.

Chloe smiles like a specialty knife,
Bea tells stories like a bubbly divorcée,
Clara smokes like a sage in her coiffed towel,
expertly naked, third eye shining.

I hang back on the shore with Kyle.
We talk about his man in New York
while our skinny-dipping sirens
sing show tunes in the violet dark.

Later, we’re all in a clinic at 3 am
handling Kyle’s broken ankle.
It’s so embarrassing, he keeps saying.

And it is: earlier, doing the sprinkler
in a dorm room to Please Don’t Stop the Music,
he kept yelling, Stop the Music! Stop the Music!
until we understood: he wasn’t actually joking.

And sometimes the poems were like that.
When we wrote knife, bubbly, naked,
we were really getting down,
dancing hard on the injury.

* * *

I’m Trying to Write a Poem about a Virgin and It’s Awful

She was very unhappy and vaguely religious
so I put her at the edge of the lake where the
ducks were waddling along like Victorian
children, living out their lives in blithe, downy
softness. She hated her idleness. I loved her
resilience. Her ability to turn her gaze on
small versions of herself seemed important.
The lake wasn’t really a lake. It was a state of
mind where words like ochre, darken and false
were supposed to describe her at her best and
worst, but they were only shadows and
everyone knows the best shadows always look
like the worst kinds of men. She wanted them
badly, so I took her for a swim. In the lake
that was not a lake, her twenty-five year old
body felt the joy of being bare and naïve among
the seaweed and tiny neon fish, but I didn’t
believe her. And I couldn’t think of anything
to say in her defense. Some people said I
should take her out of the poem. Other people
said No, take her out of the lake and put her
in a bedroom where one man is saying, I can’t
help you, and another is saying, You waited too
long. The men sounded like cynical seabirds.
When they said, Virgin, they meant, Version
we’ve left behind. I didn’t trust them. So I took
her to the rush of the sea. She waded in and
waved at me. I turned away. It wasn’t her
fault. She wasn’t the shell I was after.

* * *

Trauma with a Second Chance at Humiliation

You remind me of a man I knew at sixteen.

Every afternoon,
I climbed the stairs to see him,

my copy of The Sound and the Fury clutched to my chest,
my hands fluttering with nerves.

When he said, She was his whole world,
about Caddy’s kindness to Benji,

I thought How Beautiful,
the clocks stilling and the field widening--
his oblong figure behind the tree.

I drew eyes in my notebooks that year,
wet lashes, dense pupils.

Also his figure--slender, awkward, geometric.

~

He
liked teasing me
and also a few others. But only I
read his copy of The Dialogues.

As I read, I felt him look.
At night, I traced his scribbled notes with my finger.

~

Eight years later,
I find a man who resembles him.

It’s your encyclopedic mind.
It’s the strangeness of your features.

It’s the way you hold the burnt sugar to my mouth
to taste, then pull it away, eager for

my caramelized reaction.

~

Isn’t it delicious?

There’s always going to be someone
willing to give a spoonful

of their attention. The trick
is to recognize the conversation

will run out, right into
I’m sure we’ll run into each other sometime.

~ That was in the bookstore,
the last time I saw him.

Now you are a page I read
while holding my breath. I’ll turn you

into something else, a footnote
of a person. Like I was

sitting next to you
on our friend’s couch,

your hand on my thigh for several seconds.
You said it--Do you want me to cook for you?

as if you could promise that and more.

~

To admit I love you would be to admit

I love ideas more than men,
myself even less than ideas.

The thin line of your mouth,
I could have held it down, erased the

I didn’t mean to make you think so.

~

What you don’t say is an iris
locked in a container.

What I don’t say is an iris
burning wildly over a pool of water.

I want you take yours out.
Show it to me, please.

See how an object can change
when a new person wants it.

~

To divulge is dangerous, but it’s also chimerical.

One side of me says, Destroy.
The other, Be Gentle.

Now this pool of water is a platonic eye

that avoids attachment
by rippling away.

These ashen petals: the expectation
that you’ll understand intuitively

what has taken me years to describe.

~

I’m open to ridicule.
I can let this go.

But just so you know,
after school, it was like this:

I sat on the desk,
we talked and talked.

You could say it was nothing,
the windows fogged with winter,

the trees outside
like the shadows of a bad idea

going brittle.

It does matter.
I don’t have to tell you why.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Do You Speak Virgin?

TASTE
Summer Barbecue with Two Men
A Little Charm
You Really Killed That ‘80s Love Song
Party of One (For We Are All One)
Apologia Over Marinated Lamb
Purgatory Tastes Like Eggs

REVELATION
South Texas Persephone
Revelation at the All-Girls School
Summer Seminar
Long Distance
I’m Trying to Write a Poem about Virgin and It’s Awful

HUMILIATION
Trauma with Damp Stairwell
Trauma with Haberdashery
Trauma with White Agnostic Male
Trauma with Second Chance at Humiliation

PASTORAL
My Father and Dalí Do Not Agree
My Father and Di Chirico Asleep on Chairs of Burnt Umber
Picnic Pastoral (with Dark-Skinned Father)
My Father Lost in a Game of Chess
My Father’s Lover Lodged in Glass

MYTH
Ariadne Discusses Theseus in Relation to the Minotaur
Ariadne’s Guide to Getting a Man
Death Wish
Theseus at the Naxos Apartment Complex, 6 AM
Ariadne at the Naxos Apartment Complex, 10 AM
Theseus Returns from the Athens Treatment Center
Ariadne Plays the Physician

PARABLE
My Mother As the Voice of Kahlo
The Minotaur Invents the Circumstances of His Birth
My Mother As the Face of God
The Minotaur’s Letter to Ariadne
Separation Anxiety
My Mother&the Parable of the Lemons

REST CURE
Fast Track
The Single Girl’s Rest Cure
My English Victorian Dating Troubles
The Ariadne Year

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/15/2018
Stein follows up Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, with more rough love. "If you're going to storm,/ I said/ do it harder" opens the collection, and elsewhere the speaker insists, "What's wrong/ with me is you." Kneading dough hurts like a bruise, bombs fall like flowers of ice, a woman "kneels on her pain," and what of life? "It's all born lost/ and we just fetch it for a little while." Yet if these poems are mordant, they're also rich and sensual and glittering, and Stein delivers some bold aperçus: "the ruin I've made is in one piece," says one poem, and elsewhere "I have a turnstile heart." VERDICT If Stein wants to spin "to lose my bearings," she wants us to spin, too. Excellent poetry.

Library Journal

★ 12/18/2017
Sotelo explores the power of mythologizing personal history in her striking debut, winner of the inaugural Jake Adam York Prize. The collection is divided into seven sections—Taste, Revelation, Humiliation, Pastoral, Myth, Parable, and Rest Cure—and from the start Sotelo cultivates intimacy through moments of vulnerability. For example, in “Summer Barbecue with Two Men,” she writes, “Tonight, the moon looks like Billie Holiday, trembling/ because there are problems other people have/ & now I have them, too.” Each section is loosely themed; for example, in “Humiliation,” Sotelo deals with shame in a variety of situations, while the poems in “Pastoral” revolve around issues with a father figure. Familiar figures from Greek myths—namely Persephone, Ariadne, and Theseus— are recurring symbols that serve as a means to probe the darker sides of human behavior. In “Death Wish,” Theseus battles suicidal ideation and is later seen “bleeding from/ his head to his hands,/ like Christ without clear cause.” In the subsequent poem, he declares, “I’m only good/ at killing what I know, then taking off.” The book is also replete with novel images, as when Sotelo describes a heart as “a lake where young geese// go missing, show up bloody// after midnight.” With humanity and raw honesty, Sotelo finds fresh ways to approach romance, family, and more. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Virgin

“Virgin introduces readers to a young, Mexican-American feminist narrator who is sarcastic and unafraid, curious and self-discovering, and interested in everything from unrequited love and heartbreak to un-romanticized sex and the historically fraught terrain of virginity, and so much more. Analicia Sotelo dives headfirst into the complexities of the female experience and mind, and you’re going to love her for it.”—Bustle

“Virgin gorgeously, sensuously explores the pleasures and problems of the feminine experience. Sotelo’s language is as lush and hot as the inside of a woman’s mouth; her words can feel like a fever, like your eyes will blister if you stare too long at the page. . . . And what a pleasure to be hurt this way, with these words.”—Nylon

“Sotelo explores the power of mythologizing personal history in her striking debut . . . and from the start [she] cultivates intimacy through moments of vulnerability. . . . With humanity and raw honesty, Sotelo finds fresh ways to approach romance, family, and more.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“‘We’re all performing our bruises,’ says a speaker in Analicia Sotelo’s brilliant book, Virgin, and that’s exactly the kind of precise and wise and not-a-little-bit-hurting observations this book is made of. I suppose this book, too, then, s a performance of a kind of bruise, or bruising. But what I love is how, by leaning into the many registers of heartbreak, Sotelo makes something incredibly beautiful. Something that, in its beauty, is a kind of salve.”—Ross Gay

“In knowing intonations, the poems in Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin betray those little fables that underpin the family dynamic and the duplicities that masquerade as decorum in society. 'I am a Mexican American fascinator,' affirms this latter-day Ariadne who indulges, declines, and so abides as to transform the ceremonies of stranger and lover alike into the knowledge of hidden causes. These sly parables relate the length a 'female mind can go' to render acuity with charm in the face of disapproval or indifference: 'Now I have three heads: one/ for speech, one for sex, / and one for second guessing.’” —Roberto Tejada

“Steeped in memory, legend, and dream, Virgin is a wildly brilliant book. In it, we follow the loves and lonelinesses of a ‘Mexican American fascinator,’ who views the world around her with wit, candor, eloquence, and pain. Here family history, parable, and Greek myth combine into stories that, for all their daring, feel intimate and personal. A master of character and voice, Analicia Sotelo is a poet of enormous skill, and her first book is a pure pleasure.”—Kevin Prufer

“‘Now I have three heads: one for speech, one for sex, / and one for second guessing.’ It is this triad of speech, sex, and uncertainty that Analicia Sotelo intensely explores throughout Virgin. This debut collection brings us a poet self-aware, intensely observant of visual culture and social dynamics, knowledgeable about myth and process with a great understanding of craft. Virgin makes you look again at the power of the feminine and the necessity of feminism.”—Patricia Spears Jones

“Sometimes when we wrestle with the big questions we sacrifice humor and style. Not so with Sotelo. From her cold open onward, she burns—with sly wit, indignity, and sonic panache. ‘Do You Speak Virgin?’ asks the preface poem. And of course we do—or did, at some point—but this rhetorical question, and by extension this entire collection, will particularly resonate with women, for whom the question of virginity is particularly and historically fraught. Deliriously ruthless in its interrogation of the religious and sexual dynamics that shape us, Virgin is like a Victorian wedding gown beaded with canonical plunder and deconstructed by Frida Kahlo. Don't take your eyes off it.”—Karyna McGlynn

From the Publisher