Interstitial Archaeology

Water permeates this stunning collection—ocean, lake, saliva, tears, sweat, blood—and the deeper Felicia Zamora excavates the purer it becomes. Revisiting her childhood as a Latina living in poverty in the United States, Zamora explores racial trauma, estrangement from inherited culture and language, and the instinct to retreat into the body as a space of understanding. Grounded in the specificity of her history, her body, and her life, these poems find the universal threads that connect hummingbirds to whales, Galapagos tortoises to Matt Groening cartoons, family photographs to joy and heartache. 

Zamora scavenges her past and America’s present for the hidden meanings at the borders of the social and environmental, linguistic and physical, familial and personal. Along the way she enters into conversations with other poets, activists, and scholars, seeking wisdom, tracing wounds, and amplifying the voices of the marginalized, ultimately creating a space to constellate radical imagination.

“Interstitial Archaeology is all-consuming. It’s a marvel. Sometimes, a poetry collection feels like inhabiting the vast and intricate estate of a person’s imagination, as if entering a cathedral, where the saints, captured in stained glass, are the chalk-outlined martyrs haunting our newsfeeds. Felicia Zamora incorporates all knowledge: math, myth, and memory, from Emerson to Audre Lorde. The poetic forms included here are like a collection of fragments from a lost city. This book is impossibly good. These poems are both grounded and otherworldly. Prepare yourself. Eat a big breakfast and pack a lunch. This book is a journey.” - Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including Quotient; I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner; and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. She won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from the Georgia Review, a Tin House Next Book Residency, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for the Colorado Review.

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