This is the typical reaction when I talk to old friends about the new book:
What is the book about, they ask.
Immigration, I say.
SHE IS FINALLY GETTING POLITICAL, they say (rather, they shout.)
Variations of this are happening so often, but so often, that I am led to believe I should have grown out of poetic abstraction sooner. Thanks, Trump! We are growing stronger, more cohesive, more compassionate, more aware, and much more courageous, in a relatively short period of time. Cheers. Here is to Gratitude, for All The Negativity that is coming out of the closet: twice after the election (but not once before), people who act as if life owed them some sort of prestige threatened to use my immigration status as leverage in favor of their – their honor, I guess? Their starved sense of superiority? I can only guess. Walt Whitman comes to mind:
Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you my brother or my sister?
I am sorry for you… they are not murderous or jealous upon me;
All has been gentle with me… I keep no account with lamentation;
What have I to do with lamentation?
What have I to do with lamentation? True, my stomach turned a few weeks acidic around the inauguration, and after children were used as live ammunition I realized I shouldn’t read into my phone before I go to bed. And I surely feel ever less inclined to get out of town. But, other than that, it is getting to work. If political, then be it. If under the spotlight for being a) woman and b)born in an underdeveloped nation, then be it. In my way of making books by hand, stuff of life makes a fine content.
As such, this new book grows from the core outward, the core being an essay – Citizen, my first-person narrative about the concussion of an undocumented alien, which my editor-friend Maureen Cummins generously shaped into publishing material for her resistance journal Tinker Street last year. Gravitating around it there are photogravures, passages from my journals, letters from Celine Lombardi and Sarah Nicholls, text messages from roommate Jessica Russ and, of course, from my mother, and, if all angels of institutional licensing allow: snippets of Rebecca Solnit precious prose; a line from the diaries of Joseph Cornell; a poem by Emily Dickinson, in which she offered her being for Brazil.
I asked no other thing, No other was denied.
Why, it is after all My Take on Immigration: political-poetic, or maybe poetic-political, depending on How You Read It.
_____________________________________________________
___________________________________________
_________________________________
________________________
_______________
Last years’ election night saw to it that my friend Maureen Cummins would right away launch Tinker Street – A Journal of Visual Art, Writing and Resistance, “a fireball collection of work by writers and artists from the upstate New York region and beyond.”
Random Reports is a series of poems by Barbara Henry derived from vocabulary lists chosen by chance and choice from the first section of The New York Times. They reflect the spirit of the day and are specifically dated, and the subject of the poem is strictly a result of the wordlist.
my long time obsession with limp vellum bindings, finally fully indulged.
and there is even an explanation for it:
as for the content, after many weeks working long hours to finish it up in time for the spring Book Fair, all I can say is I hope you will enjoy as much as I do (meaning, even though I’m completely exhausted it still tickles me, as a puppy or a kitten that keeps one awake the whole night would)
as in “breathing”/”forgetting-breathing.” 
I understand proper labeling is an important function, I guess. But, what if one’s interest falls exactly in the conflict zone?
ana paula cordeiro 