Imperialism as Sweet as Insult

Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet's poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. She teaches Creative Writing and Literature in New Hampshire, has facilitated writing workshops through Youthspeaks and has helped to pioneer poetry workshops in several public schools in California and Michigan. Nadine holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan's Hellen Zell Writer's Program where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play "Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason" was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of "Beneath the Bright Discus" (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find her poems published in Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, Poor Mojo's Almana(k), Really Serious Literature, and the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario. Her dissertation, Calling out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics landed her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

On one hand Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a literary Latinx dominatrix having her way with language and patriarchy while scrupulously avoiding the scourge of sentences. On the other hand she's alive in a decaying capitalistic empire trying to survive without frying her adrenals with her: "mouth open to every time everywhere." Singing despite not knowing all the notes. Surviving despite not being a white guy in a masculinist culture dying before our eyes. Emerging: "full of sunlight ringing." She might bemoan books as "useless butter," but this is a 21st century poet with a debut book you should read before the alphabet crumbles.

-- Paul E Nelson, Founder of SPLAB, author of A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia, American Prophets (Interviews 1994-2012) and American Sentences.

This is a poetry of "quiet sounds bursting," the poems flutter and flatter as lullabies, then jar by a sudden "you are my kiss sour lemon quench," and we're mesmerized, seduced by the dreamsong of Maestas' music, a music that finds our "most midnight of places" and "knots our toes in canticles"

-Thomas Walton (author of All the Useless Things Are Mine)

Cover by Janet Nechama Miller.