Poet Sara Borjas Wins Prestigious Award
By Brian Dunlap
Last year Fresno native and L.Á. based poet and UC Riverside professor, Sara Borjas, published her debut collection Heart Like A Window, Mouth Like A Cliff,” from Noemi Press, to critical acclaim. It’s a poetry collection about her chicanx heritage, immediate family, and personal journey, in terms of love, chicanx gender rolls and expectations and, as she calls herself, of being a “Pocha.”
Continue reading “Poet Sara Borjas Wins Prestigious Award”
For our fifteenth annual look at debut poetry, we chose ten poets whose first books struck us with their formal imagination, distinctive language, and deep attention to the world. The books, all published in 2019, inhabit a range of poetic modes. There is Keith S. Wilson’s reimagining of traditional forms in Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, and Maya Phillips’s modern epic, Erou. There is Maya C. Popa’s lyric investigations in American Faith, Marwa Helal’s subversive documentary poems in Invasive species, and Yanyi’s series of prose poems in The Year of Blue Water. The ten collections clarify and play with all kinds of language—the language of the news, of love, of politics, of philosophy, of family, of place—and, as Popa says, they “slow and suspend the moment, allowing a more nuanced examination of what otherwise flows through us quickly.”
Sara Borjas is the guest on the latest episode of 
Los Angeles Literature 