Erica Mena

Tying Knots: A language of anxiety

April 1, 2019 by Erica Mena

CW: Ableism, mental illness, lots of personal stuff How might you read this work. If I tell you that each French knot is a wound, or is wound 3 times with 2 strands of floss around a needle poked first front to back through the postcard, then sewn through the pre-punched hole back to front, and returned through the hole. That each hole is placed individually in relation to the work as a whole as it unfolds. That I […]

Categories: Art, Teaching • Tags: ableism, academia, adjuncting, anxiety, aphantasia, art, borderline, burn out, embroidery, mental health, mental illness, neurodivergence, personal

Goodbye Drunken Boat, Hello Anomaly!

May 18, 2017 by Erica Mena

[Note: All documents quoted in this post are public record, comprising parts of the public non-profit corporation’s minutes, filed with the New York Secretary of State in accordance with state law and the corporation’s bylaws. All minutes of the corporation are available for public review upon request.] This is a post I really didn’t want to have to write. I believe firmly in restorative justice, and the possibility for healing and recovery within a community, despite harm done. But I also […]

Categories: Publishing, Uncategorized • Tags: abuse, Anomalous, Anomalous Press, anomaly25, drunken boat, drunken boat journal, ravi shankar, ravi shankar arrests, ravi shankar poet

Heavy Metal

April 21, 2017 by Erica Mena

I’m going to write a bit about something pretty personal here, which is a tad unusual. As many of my friends know, I became extremely ill in late September / early October of 2016. I had just moved back across country, from San Francisco to Providence, to teach Experimental Poets of Color at Brown. I loved being back at Brown, on the east coast, near family and friends. I was also teaching a poetry workshop for the super-rad Frequency Writers, and […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: copper toxicity, health, iud, iud copper toxicity, medical sexism, pain, personal, women, women's health

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Los Surcos del Azar

March 9, 2017 by Erica Mena

One of my very favorite things about translating is how hard it is. As any five translators to work on the same sentence and you’ll get five different results, all of them perfectly legitimate and yet none the same. There are a ton of great translation theorists who talk about this (many of whom I’ve been teaching this semester in the phenomenal translation theory class I’m doing with the Low Residency MFA in Literary Translation at Mills College!), but that […]

Categories: Translation • Tags: antonio machado, erica mena, literary translation, poetry, poetry translation, translation

Experimental Poets of Color

September 19, 2016 by Erica Mena

Up until a few years ago I thought I had to choose between being a “Puerto Rican poet” and being an “experimental poet.” Puerto Rican poets write about things like their abuela, or El Morro, o la isla, o salsa, o Nuevayork, o cualquier cosa. It probably didn’t help that the only Puerto Rican poet writing in English I knew, knew of, or had ever heard of was Martín Espada, whose work is exceptional and beautiful and extremely lyrical and more or less […]

Categories: Poetry, Teaching • Tags: experimental poetry, poetry, teaching

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How to Make A Difference

July 17, 2016 by Erica Mena

Yesterday the poet and artist Taylor Steele (who I’m fortunate enough to virtually know, and smart enough to admire fiercely) posted something that was like a fucking wake-up call. She pointed out, in a Facebook post inspired by Jayson Smith and Jayy Dodd, that the work of just surviving this world in a black body, much less thriving in it, creating, performing, and educating is immense, and almost always uncompensated. Because black people are subjected to unending violence, and then expected to […]

Categories: Art • Tags: activism, black lives matter, blm, fundblackfutures

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Accountability, Harassment, and White Male Fragility

June 20, 2016 by Erica Mena

I just created a label in my editor’s gmail for DrunkenBoat: Harassment. I know from experience in other leadership positions that this is a label I will have to use all too often, even in the supposedly progressive field of literary arts. This is a label I need to have because I need to keep records of the men (it’s always men) who can’t handle rejection (par for the course in literary publishing), or can’t handle correction, or can’t handle […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: drunken boat, feminism, fragile masculinity, male privledge, male tears, toxic masculinity

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Cat Lorem Ipsum

June 13, 2016 by Erica Mena

See owner, run in terror lick yarn hanging out of own butt jump off balcony, onto stranger’s heador meowing non stop for food so swat turds around the house. Spit up on light gray carpet instead of adjacent linoleum climb a tree, wait for a fireman jump to fireman then scratch his face, and rub face on owner ignore the squirrels, you’ll never catch them anyway chase ball of stringswat turds around the house. Stares at human while pushing stuff […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: book design, cats

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Dark Things Have Their Origin In Myself

February 25, 2016 by Erica Mena

[or notes on reading about the gothic] A few months I decided it was high time I stopped denying my ultra-goth aesthetic leanings and instead turn fully into exploring them. This was mostly thanks to the phenomenal collection of essays Dark Museum by Maria Negroni, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero and published by Action Books. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I realized that there is perhaps a way of approaching the gothic as a latinx that would allow me to circumvent the […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: darkness, gothic, poetry

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The Making of the Covers

March 20, 2015 by Erica Mena

7 runs, 9 hours, 4 days, 3 different presses, 3 different covers. Maybe only another letterpress printer will understand the insanity that felt like, getting three of the four handmade letterpress covers for the Anomalous Press 2015 season done in the past week. (The fourth is being printed by the phenomenal Lee Marchalonis, and I don’t even know what it looks like yet, but she’s one of my favorite printers ever!). I started out last week with the cover for The All-New by […]

Categories: Chapbooks, Publishing • Tags: anatomy of a museum, Anomalous Press, creative nonfiction, drown/sever/sing, fiction, ian hatcher, iceland, kendra greene, lina maria ferriera cabeza-vanegas, nonfiction, penis museum, phallological museum, poetry, rosmarie waldrop, the all-new, third person singular

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