Celebrating Brenda Cárdenas as Wisconsin’s Poet Laureate!
Today we’re thrilled to celebrate Wisconsin’s new Poet Laureate, Brenda Cárdenas! Cárdenas is the author of 2023’s Trace (Red Hen Press) and Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009), as well as several chapbooks. She also served as co-editor of Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest, for which she was recognized by Chicago Women in Publishing. She served as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate from 2010-2012, and is Professor Emerita of English here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Cárdenas frequently collaborates with artists in other mediums, and recently her poetry has been set to music by the Greek trio Starwound, and by composer Daniel Alfonso. Much of the work in her recent collection, Trace, highlights her inter-art, inter-textual, ekphrastic practice, as poems recognize the work they respond to, and follow from: prints, paintings, sculptures, photography, film, and other poems. This ekphrastic impulse manifests in incisive, multi-sensory description that surrenders to memory, or imperative, or history, or feeling. Responding to the art of El Anatsui, she demands: “Plant / feet so firm, will takes root. Plant will / so wide, ears sprout ancestral maize.”
Her poems conflate human bodies with material, modern life, and with capital-N-Nature – not a flattening, but an enchantment, as objects, landscapes, people are animated by and through one another: “How many stones did I have / to swallow before my legs / believed their own weight?” Grief over a dead sparrow found in one’s bathtub. Grief over a family drowned in a river seeking a better life. A litany of plastics overwhelming the page and the planet. Playful language of children’s literature – P is for… — juxtaposed with a “blood-splashed underpass” and “peyote tongues.” Religious iconography. A stone that “hissed like a radiator” and chatter that scattered “like mice”.
As Mauricio Kilwein Guevara puts it in the introduction to her 2005 chapbook, From the Tongues of Brick and Stone, “These feathered poems come with heart and lungs, bones, muscles, sinews, claws, and tongue.”
Cárdenas will serve as our Poet Laureate for the next two years.
Linocuts by Jeff Abbey Maldonado, and featured in From the Tongues of Brick and Stone.
Read more poetry by Brenda Cárdenas.
Listen to a recording of Alfonso’s “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros.”
