LAUREN
HOLGUIN

This is a lightning bolt cracklin’ through the streets, breaking in and breaking out of the cement & walls, voices & page-shimmies of the the people singin’ and rhymin’, doin’ and becoming One. There are ghosts and kids w/o names, rappers & X’s, unknowns & pains & suffering, melodies from the wounded, hearts spilling & voices ascending & Whitman everywhere saying everything & huggin’ everyone, high & low & there’s a map you can follow as it fades away, as your perception attempts to grasp a zillion realities. You feel the bodies because you hear the bodies because you will find meaning everywhere. Pennies and bullets is the name of the Boulevard, empty cop cars and dead animals—and, yet, there is joy sweating out of this journeying text and it’s multiple panels, voice-elevators and trauma & beauty menus. Enter this multi-neighborhood of multi-selves and texts, grab the atoms if you can touch them, find the Cha-Cha-Cha’s, find the lines smoothin’ everything you have been missing in America—it is here, in the hands of this most talented poet, of these shattering episodes, scenes, jams, riffs, bongós clappin’ fast as you walk by to the beat of “I’m the capital T in TEACH,”an explosive debut of a most kind, non-stop, knowing writer.
 

— U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, 2022 Subnivean Awards Final Judge, on Holguin's winning poems