Proprioception

C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry—DIRT (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and LIBERTY.

“C. Prudence Arceneaux is a brilliant poet of immense ferocity & velocity. The poems of Proprioception move with muscular grace, surprise, and startle, feeling utterly fresh, unlike anyone else’s poems. How Arceneaux manages to be wry, sexy, contemplative, and rueful all at once, is a wonder. I love the weed pulling! What a gift. Sprung from astonishment, whirling, shifting, pitching a mind into wild new states of being, these poems are alive.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next and The Tiny Journalist “C. Prudence Arceneaux’s debut unfolds like a taxonomy of desire, ferociously precise in the face of all it risks. Proprioception’s resolute muscularity deals in the erotic, esoteric, and ironic alongside the fusions, the refusals, the lyric and literal unrest only an embodied witness, shorn of self-pity, without a thought of folding, could hold in her hand. Few first collections have redoubled my allegiance to poetry’s audacity, musicality, and vitality like this one.”—Susanna Childress, author of Jagged with Love and Entering the House of Awe and Extremely Yours