To Pay for Our Next Breath Volume 12

Alfonso Zapata is a poet living in Lexington, Kentucky. He received his MFA in poetry at The University of Kentucky, and has attended The University of Toledo and The University of Southern Mississippi, where he obtained his master’s degree in poetry. He is the recipient of the Jim Lawless IV Poetry Prize, and the 2022 & 2023 University of Kentucky MFA Poetry Awards. His work has appeared in Sho Poetry Journal, and he is the author of the chapbook, Together Now (Belle Point Press, 2024). He can be found editing and re-editing supposedly finished poems in various coffee shops in the area.

“[S]inging in every key while simultaneously dancing across and down the page. . . . [Zapata] is our new Prom King!”—Frank X Walker, author of Load In Nine Times “[U]nfailingly likable, often tremendously funny, and always, always, heartbreakingly honest.”—Julia Johnson, author of Subsidence  “In this must-read collection . . . Zapata details to how to build a life in the shadows of totems.”—DaMaris B. Hill, author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing“Like the many Aureliano BuendÍas in MÁrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the many Alfonsos in To Pay for Our Next Breath represent a genealogy where time becomes elastic, and one must wait to be named: ‘My family has never called me / Alfonso. It’s reserved for the elders.’ Zapata’s attention to family and memory are connected to music, and his muscular lyrics reflect a language that is rough and lush, direct and course, bombastic and tender, as speakers move from what Louise Gluck would describe, ‘How heavy my mind is, filled with the past.’  The concern with the past is an ongoing flux where the poet’s attention turns to the landscape and the fragility of life in places where there is a constant threat to ecological destructions. But it’s Zapata’s language that transports us, ‘make language intravenous,’ he writes, as if anything other than language is payment enough to guarantee our next breath.—Richard Boada, author of We Find Each Other in the Darkness