Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews (she/they) is a Filipinx-American poet and literary critic. She is the author of Between (2018, Finishing Line Press), winner of the New Women’s Voices award, and A Brief History of Fruit (2020, University of Akron Press), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Allentown and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she received her BA in creative writing from The Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in poetry from Penn State University, and a PhD in English Language and Literature from Yale University. She is currently Associate Professor of English and coordinator of creative writing at the University of Ottawa, and she also serves as an editor of the literary magazine Cherry Tree. Source

How to Get into a Poem

(Standing Stone Creek, Pa.)

[A startling observation about the nature of human life]
or [A concrete description of trout]
[Backstory, alluding to an individuating experience]
or [Personal background, like “I have a weird relationship
to rural America”]
[Imagery only loosely related to backstory/background]
[Plants]
[Fruits]
or [Tropical fruits if part of you is tropical]
[Some intellectual discourse on the word “part”]
or [Agonized associative thinking about the nature
of something politically urgent, like colorism]
[A return to the opening vignette so folks stay on track,
like “is it possible that a suburban mixed kid actually
has nothing at all to claim, not the trout, not the breadfruit”]
[A direction, e.g. “towards”]
or [A time e.g. “now” or “after”]
[A prepositional or noun phrase if grammatically necessary]
[A turn, which should also be startling, as in oh
this is what the poem is really about]
or [Imagery that achieves roughly this purpose, like that of
the properties of brackish water,
or the length and nature of brackish days]

Published:

2017

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2024

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Identity

Nature

Politics