Mammal is the title poem from Ana MarĂa Caballero’s book Mammal, which won the 2022 US National Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and was a semifinalist for the 2023 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize.
This performative work honors her spoken-word history and poetry’s tradition of orality. In this multifaceted rendition of self, she speaks her poem via movement, exploring how body language ties into spoken language.
Caballero's work probes how the inescapable rhythms of our bodies govern our emotional hungers. We like to view ourselves as in control, but desires we don’t quite understand determine how we relate to ourselves, our partners, our children, our parents. Even metaphysical, spiritual quests are launched from the plane of the sensorial, which hinges on our animalistic need for survival. Intimate relationships are also at the mercy of our inborn—and often opposing—longings for emotional stability and adventure, generating subtle layers of conflict with others that we have difficulty comprehending.
Through her verse, she plumbs the tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) it. Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them–without romanticism or preciousness.
Mammal lifts the veil off romanticized motherhood and challenges the notion that sacrifice is a virtue. Its lush, multivalent verse gives voice to what is left unsaid in that all important space of the home.
Photography by Luis Gaspar.
