Description:
A raw, vivid debut collection centering love, anger, and Indigenous identity through the color red; reclaiming heart, body, and land with Chumash roots and queer vision.
Brief description: Solange Aguilar (They/Ze) is a queer Mescalero Apache, Yo'eme, and Filipinx (Kalinga/Kapampangan) multimedia artist, poet, and zinemaker. They are a 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize winner with Write Bloody Publishing, a co-winner of the Corazón de Oro from Raíces for their work on the Mispu Story Signs at Santa Barbara City College, and a first place winner in the Santa Barbara Poetry Slam. They are also a recipient of The Pachamama Skillshare and Women's Creative Collective for Change artist scholarship and a 2021 fellow from the Artist2Artist program by the Art Matters Foundation.
Review Quotes:
Red Like Earth trembles with visceral urgency and desire. Solange Aguilar's poems feel electric, exploring relationship terrain like a wrenched open, healing heart. There is a necessary Indigenous poetic here, full of Land Back ethos and ancestral passions made new. "I hope I/pass down/ a legacy of /softness," Aguilar writes. This is a rising, powerful voice.
-Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate and author of This Many Miles from Desire, Gardening Secrets of the Dead, Scar and Flower, and In Praise of Late Wonder
RED LIKE EARTH has teeth, guts, and fierce heart. Aguilar's language bursts like prickly pear, flutters among stars, burns in their striking and intimate style. Whether dissecting the lived and layered violences of the body under settler colonialism or insisting on our enduring kinship with the world, this collection will sweep you. In the words of Klee Benally, "let it carry you forwards towards liberation."
-Kinsale Drake, author of The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket and founder of NDN Girls Book Club
In Red Like Earth, Solange Aguilar makes tender work of chronicling the heart's fracture. Where Indigenous Regalia-"born from the most beautiful brown hands in the world"-dances in moonlight. Lovers speak honey and cherry cola is a secret indulgence for a "City NDN." Here, the quest for stolen land and stolen languages and stolen peoples roils each page, tenaciously celebrating, memorializing, haunting, and reimagining. "In this place," Aguilar writes, "women / with voices like rivers / do not go missing." This book, dear reader, is a revolution.
-Jeanann Verlee, author of PREY, Said the Manic to the Muse, and Racing Hummingbirds
RED LIKE EARTH sings in the sacred space between the body, the beloved, and the life-saving magic sprung from the good dirt. Bursting with delicate lyric and knife-sharp narrative, this collection is required reading. Aguilar is a dynamic and well-prepared guide through the power of what contemporary Native literature can do - awaken the spirit, enliven the heart, and speak truth to power one poem at a time.
-Desireé Dallagiacomo, author of SINK
Solange Aguilar's Red Like Earth is a luminous collection of poems that easily transcends the confines of ordinary language and time. Here, the heart is an unbound universe, its yearning, a feral hymn. Through this lens of sacred vulnerability, Aguilar ushers us through the viscous landscape of colonial impact to remind us:
How wondrous are we /
to be so small / and so big all at once /
Big enough to hold a story
-Rachel McKibbens, author of Pink Elephant, Into the Dark