José Olivarez
José Olivarez is the son of Mexican immigrants. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods. In 2018, he was awarded the first annual Author and Artist in Justice Award from the Phillips Brooks House Association and named a Debut Poet of 2018 by Poets & Writers. In 2019, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Source
My Therapist Says Make Friends with your Monsters
we are gathered in truth,
because my therapist said
it was time to stop running,
& i pay my therapist too much
to be wrong, so i am here.
my monsters look almost human
in the sterile office light.
my monsters say they want
to be friends. i remember
when we first met, me & my
monsters. i remember the moment
i planted each one. each time
i tried to shed a piece of myself,
it grew into a monster. take this one
with the collar of belly fat
the monster called Chubby, Husky,
Gordito. i climbed out of that skin
as fast as i could, only to see some spirit
give it legs. i ran & it never stopped
chasing me. each new humiliation
coming to life & following after me.
after me, a long procession of sad
monsters. each monster hungry
to drag me back, to return me
to the dirt i came from. ashes
to ashes, fat boy to fat.
my monsters crowd around me,
my therapist says i can't
make the monsters disappear
no matter how much i pay her.
all she can do is bring them
into the room, so i can get
to know them, so i can learn
their names, so i can see
clearly their toothless mouths,
their empty hands, their pleading eyes.
Published:
2017
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2022
Themes:
Body & Body Image
Mental Health
Literary Devices:
Caesura
a break between words within a metrical foot
Enjambment
a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Personification
the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing
Tercet
A stanza of three lines of verse that rhyme together or are connected by rhyme with an adjacent stanza.
Varied syntax
diverse sentence structure