Girl's Guide to Leaving

"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 desertblue night but you will anyways I know this you'll cry out as the coyotes do weep -Excerpt from "Desert Note"