In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Felicia Zamora

You have two poems in Volume 28 of Water~Stone, ”Ecogodliness” and “Always Incomplete.” In “Ecogodliness,” what drew you to use brackets instead of parentheses?

In the full collection of poems, Ecogodliness is a series with all the same title. This particular “Ecogodliness” uses brackets instead of the parenthetical, because I was looking to convey a polyvocality that honored it’s disruptive nature, both formally and in expression. The metaconversation that is being formed is both an interior one but also a larger societal one of self-denial, of withholding, of shame (of being a woman of color who still brings in Emerson to a poem and what that means of what poets get taught and what sticks in society), and of connectivity. The hard edges of the brackets felt demonstrably more worrisome than the smooth edges of parenthesis for this poem. That worry feels important. 

“Always Incomplete” is so very gentle in its totality. There’s even the slightly comedic images of axons with their “feet up on the couch, slurping raspberry slushies.” Where did the gentleness come from? The comedy?

Wow, thank you for this generous “so very gentle in its totality.” What a gift! Also, you seeing the comedy as a reader makes me feel seen. I’m honored by you feeling this intended gentleness. 

I laughed every day during chemo. I had to. Five months is no drop in the bucket in one’s existence. Some days, I was at the infusion center for six hours or more. Having an imagination, poking fun at a shitty situation, being willing to joke about the possibility of death, loss, a difference in my body made me feel more like myself and not just a ‘cancer patient.’ This poem arose from finding out that in the last six weeks of chemo, the Taxol (chemo drug) was frying my nerve endings in my hands and feet. I had to make the decision to end treatment early as the doctors were afraid the nerve damage would be even more severe. The poem’s epicenter becomes more on the choices we make, the beliefs we have, and the invoking of the imaginary, the surreal, to explain the world to ourselves. It’s also a strange love poem to my slushy-slurping axons and belief in my own body. The humor becomes the gentleness. Gentleness, which exists, even in strange, painfilled situations. 

When dealing with a medical topic in poetry, how do you find a balance between fact and feeling?

It’s not really about balance, as there’s always feeling in facts. Facts are never objective, because humans have a role in socially constructing them. Somatically, there are facts in feelings as well. The two are extremely interconnected. I often see it as I’m using feeling to back up a fact in my poetry, not the other way around. I love me some facts. Facts are powerful but become uninteresting/overwhelming/unspecific if not contextualized by our emotional response or impact they have to the voice or experience of the poem. We are brought to poetry to experience, think, and feel. The feeling in a fact matters. For me, personally, the story isn’t that I was diagnosed with aggressive stage two breast cancer, it’s what I did with that information, how I felt, and how processing alongside facts and an ancient Codex from my lineage, felt divined. The facts become lifted up by the emotions. 

What themes do you return to?

Oh, I’m obsessed with the body. Obsessed with body-knowledge and cognitive-feeling interact. The body as materiality, and also movement and also thought-synapsing, with the latter two being more unexplainable magic. Language as a construct—all it’s glorious failures and connective potential— including using English, with its violent history toward marginalized people, to reclaim use for me, my beloveds, BIPOC, Queer, and Trans folx. I’ll also be honest, my anger has been uncontained lately— genocide of Palestinian people, US fascism, ICE killing innocent people, US leaving the World Health Organization and global climate groups, the list is heartbreakingly long. Yet—Minneapolis showing the country a blueprint on how to show up for each other, how to resist. Yet— rallies across the country for ICE OUT. Lots of yets too. Liberatory practices are deeply ingrained in my belief in poetry. Poetry as dissent. I return to that too. Art is powerful. I’m reading Nikki Giovanni right now, Black Feeling, Black Talk/ Black Judgement. She doesn’t mince words. We need that right now. 

What books are your favorites? What authors do you admire?

I have so many favorites, so I’ll give you the poetry books I’m in the middle of today: Donika Kelly’s The Natural Order of Things, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s I Don’t Want to Be Understood, Cathy Linh Che’s, Becoming Ghost, Kinsale Drake’s The Sky Was Once A Dark Blanket, Chet’la Sebree’s Blue Opening, Mai Der Vang’s Primordial, and Kimberly Alido’s Traceable Relations. 

What are you working on now?

I’m currently working on a hybrid book of poetry driven by the Zuihitsu form, vignettes, and docupoems. These ecopoems are through the lens of a Latina researcher investigating climate change with an attunement to impacts on Latine experiences in the Anthropocene. The manuscript traces contemporary environmental issues using portents and more-than-human indicators such as glaciers, sediments, bees, fanshell muscles, and more. This project is off the curtails of my book Murmuration Archives— a project that took me to the Vatican Apostolic Library to study the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, one of the few ancient Mesoamerican sacred texts to survive the Spanish colonization of Mexico— that will release from Noemi Press in August 2026. Both of these poems from WSR are inside this upcoming book, although in slightly different forms. Murmuration Archives was an immense amount of research combined with my own personal journey of fighting breast cancer in 2022 and 2023. El Cielo En Nuestros Ojos :: Ecological Inamorata Poem Pulse, the new project, digs my heals into both field research and ecological docupoetics even further. My hope is to have a full draft of the manuscript ready in Summer 2026. We’ll see. In both of these manuscripts, I’ve felt that tinge of I have no idea what I’m doing. I take this as a good sign. It means I’m risking in my poetry in new way, in ways that make the discomfort a signal for something unexpected. I’m using doubt as encouragement here, letting the doubt come to the page feels crucial. 

Felicia Zamora’s eight books include Murmuration Archives (Akrilica Series, Noemi Press 2026), Interstitial Archaeology (Wisconsin Poetry Series 2025) and I Always Carry My Bones (Iowa Poetry Prize/Ohioana Book Award—Poetry). She has won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C. P. Cavafy Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, and has received residencies/fellowships from CantoMundo, Tin House, and Yaddo. Her poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, The Nation, and Orion. She’s an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for Colorado Review.