maps you can’t make
mariella saavedra carquin
Paperback • 5.5” x 8.5” • 102 pages • $16
September 5, 2023 • ISBN
978-1-7356783-5-1
Colorado Book Awards Finalist
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Colorado Book Awards Finalist •
Trauma takes up real space within us, and it can be so difficult to hold. How do we access that place of longing and loss, of fragmented memory and grief? How do we carry it as we walk in the world? There’s no map for this, no clear path through the internal landscape it reshapes, no easy way to make meaning of our lives in that disoriented state. Mariella Saavedra Carquin confronts hard truths in this powerful debut collection, pushing through layered complexities of immigration, race, and identity to find a way forward.
We run in burning sands
from things that some of us
can’t just outrun
Audiobook
“Ruby Sales, civil rights activist, once explained that when she walks into a conflict situation where voices are loud with anger and violence is imminent, the first thing she asks is, ‘Where does it hurt?’ The poems in Mariella Saavedra Carquin’s Maps You Can’t Make ask that question and explore those hurting places both internally in each of us and externally in the world, spaces where healing and wholeness need to happen. Saavedra Carquin’s voice is both bold and tender, lyrical and penetrating. Here is a poet who does not turn away from what needs to be seen and named in order to be transformed. These skilled and stunningly prescient poems accompany us on journeys to the uncharted and often marginalized parts of our world, refusing the perch of privilege of the one who glibly knows. We are in discovery mode, unafraid because we have her words to hold and the promise that there are rerootings but only if we acknowledge the uprootings of loss and exile, identities, loved ones and homes. The ending of her poem ‘We Carry It’ fittingly describes what this collection accomplishes: each poem bursts us open and empties its glitter over everything. Even without a map, we know a way forward.”
—Julia Alvarez, poet, essayist, and novelist
Author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Afterlife
“Poetry for me is all in the style and texture of the writing—Mariella Saavedra Carquin’s writing holds our hands & stares us in the soul & cries with us too. These are poems that make music of our grief and perseverance. Read along to sing along: Mariella Saavedra Carquin is making maps & language out of the unnameable truths of our lives.”
—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold
“Blurring and braiding the lines between history and memory, these poems viscerally metabolize experiences of love and care, loss and violence. Through internal, keen observations of self and others, Saavedra Carquin details the geographies and gestures of fleshly bodies and feelings with brutal honesty. The movement of the words in one poem takes the reader to a place of ease and tenderness, and in the next poem leaves the reader tending to the needs of still-raw wounds. The emotional terrain that his poet travels provides no maps, but she gives the reader many places to land.”
—Julie Todd, Ph.D., author of 50: Thorns and Blossoms
John Wesley Iliff Senior Adjunct Lecturer in Justice and Peace Studies
PRESS & PRIZES
2024 Colorado Book Awards finalist in poetry
“Moving across voices and languages, Mariella Saavedra Carquin confronts trauma and still finds hope.”
Interview with Atmosphere Press, April 2024
Letras Latinas author spotlight, January 2024
(also included in “34 Books by Latinx Poets from the Second Half of 2023”)
Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, “People in the News,” October 2023
Vagabond City, “Now Read This,” September 2023
“I wrote these poems as a way to process and make sense of stories I kept telling myself. As an immigrant, as a formerly undocumented immigrant, I want our stories to be told. There is grief and loss in change, in moving, and in changing as a person along the way, over and over. The more we see our experiences reflected in others’, the more we normalize our feelings.
As a therapist, I sometimes feel like a vehicle moving around in the room, trying to capture a feeling and communicate it back. My writing feels similar. It’s a back-and-forth until you can catch the thing.”
About the Author
Mariella Saavedra Carquin has practiced as a licensed mental health counselor in New York City in clinical, higher education, and middle school settings and now works in integrated primary care at Children’s Hospital Colorado through the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She is a graduate of Middlebury College, holds an EdM and an MA in psychological counseling from Columbia University, and recently earned an MA from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English. In addition to writing poetry, she has published in various academic journals on the psychological impact of microaggressions experienced by undocumented immigrant youth. Born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Miami, Florida, she currently lives in Denver, Colorado. This is her first book. Photo by Dennis Saavedra Carquin-Hamichand.
Book Companion Playlist
Music curated by the author to accompany the collection
