Texas, Being
A State of Poems
Texas, Being: A State of Poems collects more than forty-five poems from a beautiful and brutal state. Some are about the music of their languages. Some speak to the dead, some to the sun, and others to omissions of history. One concerns a hedgehog cactus, and another a roller rink. From “Happy, Texas” to “Palestine, TX,” from seashores to skeletons to Selena, all are in one way or another about Texas, but good poems are always about more than one thing.
Victoria Chang writes that “there is so / much sky that even birds / get lost."
Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson describes her hometown as a “fiercely loving city tougher on the outside / but smooth as pecan shells,” and Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us to “be patient, sure there’s lots of bad around, / but more room for good too, with all this empty.” Whether it is Joshua Edwards imagining his photographer father or Primo Feliciano Marín’s declaration “Hail Texas, fraught with charms unknown,” these voices, past and present, give us a glimpse into the poetic soul of the nation’s most willful state.
Quintanilla, Iliana Rocha, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, ire’ne lara silva, Jeff Sirkin, Margo Tamez, Lao Yang, Loretta Diane Walker, Emily Winakur, and Matthew Zapruder.
Jenny Browne
is a professor of English and creative writing at Trinity University. Her most recent poetry collection is Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems. Her poems and essays have appeared most recently in the American Poetry Reviewthe Oxford American, PoetrytheNation, and theNew York Times She served concurrent terms as the 2016–18 poet laureate of San Antonio and the 2017 poet laureate of Texas, and she was the 2019–20 Distinguished Fulbright Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2023. She lives in San Antonio.
