Nicole Caruso Garcia: “The career aptitude test in high school said I should have been a forensic scientist. I didn’t much like English. Yet in college, when in Kim Bridgford’s poetry workshop she selected exemplars to share, I marveled at how those poets managed to convey the ineffable. Their poems shone like little miracles. This was possible? I was willing to gamble that if I worked hard enough at the craft, I, too, might be able to say the otherwise unutterable. A poem can be a kind of forensic account, shining a light on the hidden or overlooked, and providing a framework for the evidence. Even if you don’t get justice, you’ll have the truth. It wasn’t until years later that I first heard the phrase ‘storytelling is activism’ or suspected that writing poems was, for me, an act of defiance. When my full-length manuscript was allegedly finished, my gut said that the narrative was incomplete—not in sequence, but in scope—without this as-of-then still unwritten poem. I had been rolling around the intention in my mind for several years, but why had I avoided tackling it? Sure, a warning sign is a hard truth, but no more unpalatable than the other material in the manuscript. Ultimately, I demanded of myself that I wrangle this sestina into being, and here it is, the final poem I wrote for Oxblood.” (web)
