Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut

Vickie Vértiz earned her MFA from the University of California, Riverside. A Macondo and VONA fellow, she is a Los Angeles–based poet writer and social justice advocate who teaches creative writing to adults and young people across the country.

I want to dance in Vickie’s SoCal androgynities—her pixelated, hybrid Latinx Los Angeles cosmos, with its ‘factory imaginations,’ its ‘Mexican or not,’ its many lives rushing by and the ‘death stench’ and the tiny rivers of tears into the tacos. A furious pace, a 1,000-degree eye, here Vértiz pours out her deep reflections, her erotic ‘garage’ novelette, her low- and high-rider journey into the various infernos and paradisos. A collage of breathlessness, a nirvana incandescent set of urban and personal illuminations. A groundbreaker, a Chicana world mural tumbling toward you fearlessly."" - Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States  ""Vértiz is a powerhouse. Her work is incredibly nuanced with a savory sensibility, a full-flavored taste of place without sentimentality, without pity, and without need to justify its worth. These poems are smart, sassy, sonically enhanced, and scintillating for the senses. A must-read."" - Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Burn  ""Indicating array and incision, Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut is where the ones who are first, and last, come first. Their verbs survive, enduring violent spacing, constantly displacing song in having vividly been made to come, in form, as questions emphatically unenclosed, in love in brokenness, in the language of all languages, as lit up as Los Angeles. On the way home, but always only on the way, Vickie Vértiz runs la vida down."" - Fred Moten, author of The Service Porch