By Gabriel San Román
FROM: Los Angeles Times OC

Above the din of cumbias and a nearby vegan food fest, Dr. Natalie J. Graham’s poetic cadence soothed the crowd that gathered last month in downtown Santa Ana to hear her read. Seated in front of LibroMobile’s garage entrance, she began with works of other poets before turning to poems of her own.

In the middle of “The Watcher, Visiting Hours,” a poem about prison, Graham drew a metaphor out with her words about pregnancy and an orange, which is also the namesake crop of the county she now works and lives in.

I say think of what an orange can be,
not just food
but the seed inside the seed, like God.

Rot too. You say, it can rot, too
Rot is always gathering in its patches.

The audience latched onto every word and the space between them.

Graham ended her reading with a selection from Juan Felipe Herrera, a former poet laureate of both California and the United States. The invocation proved fitting. Graham’s appearance that afternoon at LibroMobile also served as a public introduction for a distinction of her own as Orange County’s first-ever poet laureate. Read Rest of Article Here