"Fanged and feathered," Laura Villareal fights against expectations imbedded in her existence-the expectations bound in being a woman, being queer, being Latinx-and claws her way to her own identity. Her poetry covers a vast range, invoking Mexican folklore, exploring the process of healing while hurting, and the complicated conflict between intergenerational trauma and the love of family-continuously reasserting that leaving is never a singular action, that healing isn't completed in a day, that living is a process, not a straight line. Tumbleweeds and wandering cacti litter the page, coyotes croon at the prose. In poems haunted by specters of intimate partner violence, Girl's Guide to Leaving considers what it means to escape the love that trapped you and find a temporary home in the barely cooled ashes of a wildfire. listen this part is importantyou must never let yourself try & find the first place you took root you must live like a tumbleweed you must never call out into the desert blue night but you will anyways I know this you'll cry out as the coyotes do weep -Excerpt from "Desert Note"
Laura Villareal is a 2019-21 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, a 2020-21 Stadler Fellow, and the author of the chapbook The Cartography of Sleep. She works on an interview series at F(r)iction called "Writers Talking about Anything but Writing." Her work has appeared in AGNI, Grist, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere.
Girl's Guide to Leaving Trapping Season The Conditions for Existing as Proposed by X, Y, & Z (What Makes Sense, What's Safe, What's Productive) Before Skipping Town Sardine Spine The Long Trajectory of Grief Afterwards I Still Check for Monsters Before I Go to Bed Baby Teeth Outgrowing a Home Desert Note The Astronomer's Daughter Crush Home Is Where the Closet Is Inside the Foxhole Inside All the Places I Can't See Down By the Water Slash-and-Burn If I Invited You to Love Me Mother // Monster Thanksgivings Heart Attack Curas & Dichos My Worries Have Worries Uncertainty with Fish Scales Solar Eclipse // Myself In Orbit (My)thology A Bedtime Story About the Heart Ending in Contrition or Resignation When Joy Split Open Seeds Boiling Puffins 8 Chickens in a Papier-MAche Human: A Bedtime Story Before You Visited Acknowledgments
"A folklore troubadour, Villareal ably unfolds a path through memory. Running wild and running home, this guide isn't just for leaving but rather for making space in sites where one can 'witness local miracles' or to tell a heroine's story without remorse. This is a rangy and ambitious book."--Carmen Gimenez Smith "Formally diverse, this collection wants to "tell you all hearts find good homes eventually" while moving through contrapuntals, prose blocks, and open field poems that articulate anything but statis, that articulate that perhaps the place we will find the most comfort for our hearts is in the act of forward motion, in the act of leaving."--Chet'la Sebree "Laura Villareal's future shines bright if her debut full-length collection, Girl's Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press), is anything to judge her by. Villareal's poems are full of longing and letting go of one's loves and expectations around relationships, family, and culture. She wraps the rich tapestry of her inherited Mexican folklore around each poem, reinventing the speaker, the story, and the land in the process."--Washington Independent Review of Books "Laura Villareal's full-length debut rests upon the slow healing of myth-making, the retrospective balming of injury to lore. Grief is guarded in secret like a torn photograph in your shirt pocket. Leaving--a ritual ripe with a yearning to outrun the predatory stride of memory. Every escape charts new cartographies--away from homes that shelve your "whole self away / in the garage or attic," smell of "Diesel cologne, brass & birdshot," and towards a body habitable by your tenderest of parts. Girl's Guide To Leaving moves through the curative wisdom of transit, unrestrained in its desire to flee and toss a lit match behind it."--Ana Portnoy Brimmer, author of To Love An Island
