Auto/Body (A/B) was reviewed at so many great journals this late Winter and Spring.
At the Poetry Foundation, DIEGO BÁEZ wrote:
“Auto/Body by Vickie Vértiz draws on the ostentatious beauty and raw power of Los Angeles car culture to interrogate constructions of gender and family dynamics within a Latinx context. Several maximalist poems appear spread across the page, great swathes of text with jags and stripes excised. “Desfile,” shaped like a shield with a diagonal banner of whitespace drawn across it, depicts East L.A.’s Mexican Independence Day Parade, a celebration of contradictions, in a blend of English and Spanish[.]” Read the rest of the review here.
At Alta, David Ullin wrote “Where We Are Now,” that includes A/B:
Like Taylor, Vickie Vértiz is writing from the crossing point of history, where the individual and the landscape intersect. “Have you / noticed,” she asks in “Anther,” a poem in her second full-length collection, Auto/Body (she is also the author of the chapbook Swallows), “how the / strobe light is also / a searchlight. The same / way we are surveilled is how we / celebrate.”
And for the most automotively incisive and detailed review yet, “‘AUTO/BODY’: DRIVING FORCE,” by GUS BERG
“Transmission presents a final question: Given a finite amount of energy, where should we channel our outrage, and how should we conserve our resources? When our bodies begin to fall apart, how can we keep going before reaching our final destination?”
Thank you, Alta, Poetry Foundation, and Zyzzyva!
Vickie Vértiz 