Perkele
by Erica Mena
Perkele. It’s my favorite Finnish word, and I’m not alone. It’s perhaps the best known Finnish word, the most Finnish Finnish word.
Categories: Art • Tags: handmade, letterpress, notebook, rewards
Tying Knots: A language of anxiety
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!
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
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
Los Surcos del Azar
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
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
How to Make A Difference
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
Accountability, Harassment, and White Male Fragility
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
Cat Lorem Ipsum
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
Dark Things Have Their Origin In Myself
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
Erica Mena 