Wendy Trevino
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Cruel Fiction
Cruel Fiction brings together new material with celebrated work, including the provocative and charged “Brazilian Is Not a Race,” a sonnet sequence meditating on race, nation, and history seen from the author’s native Rio Grande Valley. This is a spectacular debut trying to puzzle though the insurgencies, context, and kinesis of our present, from the workplace to the pop charts but most of all to the politics of struggle. “Wendy Trevino is my leader in craft. Cruel Fiction is my courage before a county judge. Born captive, I am inspired to at least take back my likeness. Against industrialists who know that in fire we are at home. One more poem could put the ghetto on the brink of irreversible rebellion. The continuum of slave fields will all know justice and Trevino has a proletariat story for every city this side of 2008.” — Tongo Eisen-Martin, California Book Award 2018
View playlistPoetry + Abolition
On his work with the Prison Story Project, Matt Henriksen once said: “Regardless of our pasts or your pasts and regardless of those walls, we can meet in the space words create and share stories and ideas. We bring our story-telling-know-how to you and bring your visions of the world back to us.” As I reflect back on Matt’s legacy of advocacy for the incarcerated, and the poetry we shared over time, his presence feels deeply connected to my own growth as a reader & writer contemplating justice within the creative word. Over recent months, I have found myself turning or returning to each of these poems as I deepen my understanding of the prison industrial complex and the necessity of abolition. In August 2020, after another psychotic break, I found myself turning to poetry & mad survivor narratives to make sense of my own lived experiences, standing on the bridge between disability justice & abolition. A few months back, I stumbled upon “Zombies in a House of Madness” in an old 1970’s copy of Madness Network News Reader, & have been both haunted and comforted by the legacy of Michael Beasley as a poet and abolitionist before my time. I was enamored by Beasley’s reach—from a short film of his poem by Saul Landau within San Francisco Jail, to a musical collaboration with singer/songwriter Country Joe McDonald, Beasley’s connections to others begin within and move beyond the prison’s walls. Each poem in this playlist speaks back to what I see in Michael Beasley’s work, and has been in my ear as I think through the necessity of disability justice, mad narratives, intersectional movements, and our call to abolition.
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