HOLLY IGLESIAS

Holly Iglesias is the winner of the 2008 Kore Press First Book Award. She is a poet and translator of Spanish whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Prose Poem, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Margie, Crab Orchard Review, Massachusetts Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has been awarded fellowships by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Edward Albee Foundation. She is the author of two chapbooks, Hands-on Saint and Good Long Enough, winner of Thorngate Road’s Frank O’Hara Prize. A critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry, was published by Quale Press. She teaches at University of North Carolina-Asheville and at Warren Wilson College.

Sample from Souvenirs of a Shrunken World:

Façade

The park fills with noise, saws, hammers, gossip, complaints about the mud, flies, the cow gone dry. Glad for the work, the lot of us, camped in tents and abandoned streetcars. My Larry hangs plaster, huge gewgaws molded by the Italians, on the palaces taking shape behind falsework.

Baby’s due any day, bigwigs planning a fuss. For the papers, not me. My
job is to push her out, then present us proper for the baptism, quaint little
family all cleaned up. Priests and dignitaries will press in for the photograph, their faces close to hers in hope of sharing the fame—Louisiana Purchase O’Leary, first-born of the Fair.