Description: Cawood's poems are time machines, love letters. Maps marked up with stars. --Melissa Fite Johnson, author of GREEN. Born and raised in Ohio, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood moved to the South over two decades ago and has also lived and traveled in her mother's native country of Mexico. In her debut collection, she uses landscape and culture as a backdrop and a contrast to consider her identity and what it means to migrate from one location to another, how a place's values and societal expectations can shape who you become, and how you can be both a part of something and apart from it. Many of these poems interrogate memories, some that are inherited, some that are secret, some that are supposed. Cawood uses autobiography and imagination in her poems to consider what it means to be young, to fall in and out of love, to break and become whole again, to face tragedy and fear, to struggle with power, and to let go of those we love not because of lack of feeling but because of earned wisdom.
Brief description: Shuly Xóchitl Cawood is the author of the memoir, THE GOING AND GOODBYE (Platypus Press), the inspirational little book, 52 THINGS I WISH I COULD HAVE TOLD MYSELF WHEN I WAS 17 (Cimarron Books), and the short story collection, A SMALL THING TO WANT (Press 53).