National Poetry Month Celebration w/ Two Poets Laureate

This will be an in-store presentation and live streamed to Zoom, register here for Zoom.

Order your copy of Tommy Archuleta's debut work, Susto ($ 16.95, paperback) online here and Lauren Camp's Worn Smooth Between Devourings (Sept. 2023) online here or call the store to order her new work, In Old Sky (publishing April), (505) 988-4226. 

SUSTO

Surreal yet earthbound, orphaned yet mothered more than most, comforting yet disturbing— Tommy Archuleta’s Susto surveys many settings: the body, the soul, the terrain the soul encounters upon leaving the body. But the setting is also the high desert landscape that is the poet’s northern New Mexico home, a land whose beauty today is as silencing and brutal as was the colonization of the region and her Anasazi descendants by Archuleta’s Spanish antipasados.

In Susto, loss is everywhere to be found, though this work is not merely a concerted meditation on lament. Rather, it is part unearthed family album; part unlocked diary; part ode to motherhood and her various forms; part manual on preparing for a happy death; and part primer on the ancient art of curanderismo, whereby plants and roots are prepared for treating all manner of ills a mind and body might face.

IN OLD SKY

Lauren Camp was selected as the fourth Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She spent a month in Grand Canyon exploring the Park‘s pristine natural darkness and night phenomena, as well as the vast power of the Canyon itself. In Old Sky grew out of that experience. This is the first poetry book published by Grand Canyon Conservancy. It includes color photos across and into the Canyon and out to the cosmos, as well as an epic poem assembled from hundreds of responses by visitors to Grand Canyon National Park during the month of Camp’s residency.

About the Poets Laureate

Tommy Archuleta  was selected as the Santa Fe Poet Laureate in February 2024. He is a mental health and substance abuse counselor for the New Mexico Corrections Department. His work has appeared in the New England Review, the Laurel Review, Lily Poetry Review, the Cortland Review, Guesthouse, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he lives with his family on the Cochiti Reservation. Archuleta’s first full-length collection, Susto, published by the University Press of Colorado in 2023. A chapbook, Fieldnotes, was published in the Lily Poetry Review. He is currently working on his second collection. Read more about his Poet Laureate announcement here.

Lauren Camp

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023). She is writer and educator who works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops. She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and many other honors and fellowships.