Interstitial Archaeology

Felicia Zamora (Author)

9780299353445

Paperback / softback, published 1 April 2025

116 pages
22.9 x 17.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.454 kg

“Interstitial Archaeology is all-consuming. It’s a marvel. Sometimes, a poetry collection feels like inhabiting the vast and intricate estate of a person’s imagination, as if entering a cathedral, where the saints, captured in stained glass, are the chalk-outlined martyrs haunting our newsfeeds. Felicia Zamora incorporates all knowledge: math, myth, and memory, from Emerson to Audre Lorde. The poetic forms included here are like a collection of fragments from a lost city. This book is impossibly good. These poems are both grounded and otherworldly. Prepare yourself. Eat a big breakfast and pack a lunch. This book is a journey.” - Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Water permeates this stunning collection—ocean, lake, saliva, tears, sweat, blood—and the deeper Felicia Zamora excavates the purer it becomes. Revisiting her childhood as a Latina living in poverty in the United States, Zamora explores racial trauma, estrangement from inherited culture and language, and the instinct to retreat into the body as a space of understanding. Grounded in the specificity of her history, her body, and her life, these poems find the universal threads that connect hummingbirds to whales, Galapagos tortoises to Matt Groening cartoons, family photographs to joy and heartache. 

Zamora scavenges her past and America’s present for the hidden meanings at the borders of the social and environmental, linguistic and physical, familial and personal. Along the way she enters into conversations with other poets, activists, and scholars, seeking wisdom, tracing wounds, and amplifying the voices of the marginalized, ultimately creating a space to constellate radical imagination.

Claws Wide in the Mirror
Meditations on Lines
Chirality
Lilacs
Ghazal Containing My Estranged Mexican Tongue
Meditations on Flesh
Learned Intimacy
Abecedarian for My Estranged Mexican Tongue
Exhume
Meditations on Ghosts

Inscribing Anew
Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility

Leaving Halves
Poem about Human Habits of Consumption That Begins with Contemplating the Walnut in My Yard
To Haunt Air: In Consideration of Longing, the Potoo, Desire, Gallstones, &
What We Remain Still For
Tautology of Phrases, Tautology of Mathematical Logic in a Time of Climate Crisis
Taut Logic of Crisis
Errata
Triptych of Understanding Law as a Human-Made Construct with Fundamental &
Detrimental Errors

Excavation
In the Cellular

A Sharp Dawn
Interstitial Archaeology: Make My Mouth a Temple Now, without the Severing of Life or Organ to Unhaunt the Silences Lorde Warns Us About
Moratorium
To Put Meat Back
Hawk Hymn
Used to Be
Monster Talk
Tempest in the Cerebellum
Mars Exploration: Poem for Diana Trujillo &
the Work of Wonder
How Fire Works: A Fourth of July Consideration
Monopoly
Neuron Fire: Or I Want Brown &
Black &
Queer Joy to Be Ubiquitous: Or What We’
re Made of Connects Us, Fuck: Or I Am Writing This Poem when I Should Be Out Protesting so This Poem Is a Protest Instead
The Bird
Chris Martin Sings Shiver &
I Shiver: A Poem for Madam Vice President

Acknowledgments
Notes