PORTRAITS AS ANIMAL: POEMS by Victoriano Cárdenas

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Description

Portraits as Animal is a gallery of self-becoming in a “sunbaked house as tiny as a heart.” With a toothy lyricism at turns sly and forthright, Cárdenas’s hunger to belong carries us from a stove “bleeding a hundred kinds of caldo” to his “determined mitochondrial ancestors''—a journey framed by generational struggles with addiction, a queerphobic church, and the always-transforming land. 

In conversation with Taos’s rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárdenas writes through his transition, acknowledging that “to become a man means a lifetime of needles like the man who raised me.” Here is pain and violence, but here, too, is the assurance that we are “built for this metamorphosis” and can follow our past incarnations “over scorched earth neon with new grass” to a future of our own making.

about the author

Victoriano Cárdenas is a trans poet and native of Taos. He graduated with an MFA in 2020 from the University of New Mexico where he served as editor in chief of Blue Mesa Review and executive editor of Skull + Wind Press. His literary work has appeared in Witchcraft Magazine, Terraform by VICE, [PANK], and Quarterly West. Cárdenas co-wrote and appeared in the Audible Original Eminent Domain and currently writes for Lime Salt Productions and Meow Wolf. He lives in Albuquerque with his rescue dog, Sophie.