Of Form & Gather

Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Echoing the collection's provocative title, final judge Edwin Torres writes: "Zamora has crafted a work that celebrates form as human evolution-the poem's breath, the poet's body-passing over time in a landscape thirsty for passage." Privileging journey over destination, Zamora's poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things. Edwin Torres continues: "This is quietly revolutionary work. . . . A living palimpsest to newly awaken our social engagement." With the publication of this volume, the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, now in its seventh edition, emphatically makes good on its aim to nurture the various paths that Latino/a poetry is taking in the twenty-first century.

Felicia Zamora is the author of the books Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press) and Instrument of Gaps (forthcoming from Slope Editions 2017). Of Form & Gather was listed as one of the "9 Outstanding Latino Books Recently Published by Independent and University Presses" by NBC News. She won the 2015 Tomaz salamun Prize from Verse, and authored two chapbooks. Her published works may be found or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, jubilat, Meridian, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, OmniVerse, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, The Adirondack Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, The Michigan Quarterly, TriQuarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily, Witness Magazine, West Branch, and others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review and holds an MFA from Colorado State University. She is the 2017 Poet Laureate for Fort Collins, Colorado, and education programs coordinator for the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with her partner Chris and their two dogs.