Saludos y bienvenidos,
Thank you for taking the time to look me up. Please take a look around and find a collection of my work: a series of poems, images, and collaborations that form a dialogue with my lived experience when my family worked as migrant farmworkers in Yolo County, California. These collections—and the rest of my work—has been in the making since I first learned to speak English in Idaho, where my parents picked apples during the 1980s.

My amá crossed the border and desert with her 30-day-old son in her arms in 1986. My grandfather died tilling the fields in Yuba City during the 1950s, when he was part of the bracero program. The fields took a toll on my abuelita’s body, developing cirrhosis even though she never drank a drop of alcohol. She worked the fields in Yolo County from the 1960s until she passed on.
 
My work tastes of pesticides, sweat, blood, and llanto. It relates to everything that we eat and are. It is about the stink of el azadón, the queer brown body in el azadón, everything to do with la x on our bodies, the femicides around us, the femicide of our earth, and the nopal on my forehead. Quite honestly, it is a life of migration = love.

Here the poems are in constant conversation with each other.
Like the descendants of the nopal, they are the ancient, un/remembered human heart. What inspired me to write— survival, & what supports my writing practice is thriving with entire tenderness. The work toward the poem has given me a way life and being in this mundito of ours. Gracias for being here.

Writing holds a responsibility to be a witness to my people. To be a witness of the natural world & to use this gift on behalf of love
-Beth Brant

VUELTA is a long poem on a quest to recover the body through myth & memory, a reckoning with colonization & the return to our Pachamama. Vuelta to revolt, to return, to revoltijo, to revolución, to transform. It is a journey of tongue & breath that asks What's life through the mouth of the queer brown cuerpo. Vuelta insists that our bodies are a walking love language miraculously unearthing the beginning & the collapse of time where we allow ourselves to begin again in the same way the monarch continues her journey evolving over & over again.

This is a fotograph of my mother, my sister and I in Grimes, California in the early 80's. Much of the work there was with tomatoes and corn.

Recipient of the 2021 Nomadic Press Bay Area Literary Award in Poetry
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Get In Touch

I am available to teach poetry workshops and for the serendipity of creating together.
​I can be reached via email at: [email protected] 
échame un grito.
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