Montilla writes: "having lost everything she touched / her own body & became..." So here is a catalog of touches and the legacies of touches. Here is a trace of the poem inside the breath inside the fleeting, unfixable now. Here is a trace of the poet's will to testify and dream simultaneously. And Montilla is a poet of such beautiful imagination and vitality, that even as she writes ruin her lines carry the charge of indomitable desire. Her metaphors are, to me, resuscitations. An erotic, present, dreaming power coursing through. — Aracelis Girmay author of Teeth, Kingdom Animalia & The Black Maria

“I love America more than any other country in this world,” James Baldwin once wrote, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”  It is in this very spirit that Yesenia Montilla has penned one of the most scathing love letters in recent memory.  Muse Found in a Colonized Body is “something about a proletariat uprising/ something about free water & food/ something about more than just survival.”  It is something about the lies we tell ourselves about who we, as a country, are, and the life and death consequences of these lies.  With open eyes, with an open heart, Montilla lays it all out, demanding that we either do—and be—better, or risk losing everything. — John Murillo author of Up Jump the Boogie & Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry