#Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

[razorsadness]

Growing up in Texas, my identity informed every traumatic encounter with authority figures, institutions, teachers, peers, even family. Nowhere was safe—not school, not home, not friends’ houses—so I would end up wandering the swampy young pines behind our house, or jump the fence to walk to Greens Bayou, the long drainage ditch dividing our neighborhood from the trailer park. It wasn’t nature, and it wasn’t a forest, but a curtain of saplings covering municipal tanks, and it was the closest thing I had to the ancient forests and waterfalls of fantasy. Those pines, like fantasy, were a place of safety where I could escape the confines of gender, compulsory heterosexuality, and race. I could pretend to be an elf princess with a stick for a bow, jump my bike over ditches with boys, smoke cigarettes and listen to music with the bad girls, escape angry parents to read The Bell Jar under honeysuckle, tag anarchy symbols under bridges, explore flooded creeks and catch crawfish when the power was out after hurricanes, kiss and undress a little with every gender.

After I got caught sneaking out at thirteen, my parents took my bedroom door off its hinges permanently, opening my room to constant disciplinary surveillance, so throughout my adolescence the little forest was the only place I had any privacy. It was also the place where I became brave, the place that held my forbidden self, a sanctuary of desire that made safe my secrets, the moonlit clearing where young love blossomed in my body, a haven for a young girl in trouble to hide.

The nature of my youth was not the normative Nature of national parks or nature preserves or fantasy films—it was a nameless, neglected half acre of undeveloped land between cheap starter houses and mobile homes. The only way to open a portal to our world was to be disobedient, daring to break a rule, stay out after hours, trespass, damage property, jump the fence. It was a liminal site of fantasy, disobedience, rebellion, and provocation where I could fully express my most subversive, vulnerable, provocative, brave self.

—Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, from “All the Atreyus at the Sphinx Gate” (Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders; Tiny Reparations Books, 2024)

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders

By Vanessa Angélica Villarreal.

[alliwanttodoiscollectpoetry]

I Was a Good Wife by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

and an even better wolf, jawed to a thicket of lonely lungs trees I mean breathing, comet come to me, come a lone light, like the fire that rips the mountainside’s dress, I was a good ununderstood, a wrist of bent light, undressing alone an even quieter violence. I am remembering how to want my life, how to want to come even closer to the wolf I was you wanted this to be about borders

it is

[violettesiren]

At the end of her life, the moon becomes a blade, a jaw

of remember red of rooms of want you

I walk into a lake of light looking for (I can’t)

you, swelling siren in the night’s throat I must walk alone

along the edge of a demon’s mind bordered by a vein

of stars; show me how not to love, how to be a wife

to silence, how to dive into the backward sea and seclude myself

in a mirror; how long can the cone of time stretch reliving an error

how long the dawn how long before the too late light

dream with me, bell, water, bell, I follow the white cat to the crossroads:

where do I go, little song? To the one who calls you, the one you love

Wolf's Nocturne by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

[muttmoxley]

kian stone: on metamorphosis & what it means to die

inkskinned, the crying book by heather cristle, summer friends by hospital bracelet, pinterest comments, his hands by blegh, wikipedia, how we fight for our lives by saeed jones, a field of onions: brown study by vanessa angélica villarreal, the left hand of darkness by ursula k. le guin, a love letter to a dead thing by layana clouet, polyhedric-dimension, drunk drivers/killer whales by car seat headrest, bitter boy buried in the backyard by @dovahkiining

[l-just-want-to-see]

hugo brandt.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hermingway / Twitter, @/chenchenwrites / New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver / SoundCloud, Lady Macbeth “Blood,” Pan-Pan Gou / Macbeth, William Shakespeare / Body, Grandma’s House / Green Lantern Red Lanterns #28 / A Field of Onions: Brown Study, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal / tumblr, @teenbeachmovie3 / Salvage, Ada Limón / twitter, @/zimZalla / Tired, Langston Hughes / War of the Foxes, Richard Siken / Boyish, Japanese Breakfast / Cop Car, Mitski / When the Chips Are Down, Anaïs Mitchell / Nearer the Moon/ The Previously Unexpurgated Diary, 1937-1939, Anaïs Lin / oil paintings, Jen Mazza

[flowersintheimpala69]

“A Field of Onions: Brown Study” by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

[omegawolverine]

Tubbo + Connections (for @tommycroft)

Years of War, Porter Robinson / Lamb, BROCKHAMPTON / UNKNOWN / A Primer For The Small Weird Loves, Richard Siken / Mirror Traps, Hera Lindsay Bird / The Fall, SAD-ist / A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, by Roland Barthes / Hog Hunt, SAD-ist / The Winner's Kiss, Marie Rutkoski / Hog Hunt, SAD-ist / Circe, Madeline Miller / A Primer For The Small Weird Loves, Richard Siken / Under The Surface, Casserole :D / The Grove, Aron Wiesenfeld / Homestuck (2009-2016) / softestsunbeams / A Field of Onions: Brown Study, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal / On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong / Everything Stays, Adventure Time / The Fall, SAD-ist / Final Waltz, SAD-ist

[asoftepiloguemylove]

hello! could you do one on wrong timings / people almost getting it right but they don’t?

Sue Zhao / Khaled Hosseini And the Mountains Echoed / Vanessa Angélica Villarreal A Field of Onions: Brown Study / Sue Zhao / pinterest / unknown / Marina Tsvetaeva Poem of the End; The Selected Poems of M. T. / Sue Zhao

[lovenights]

vanessa angélica villarreal, ‘a field of onions: brown study’

[bebravebrisol]

On growing up while steeped in grief:

“The Fair Chase,” John Burnside // art, Riikka Auvinen // Memory, George Seferis // “Disassociative States,” Vanessa Angélica Villarreal // Remnants of a Separation: A History of Partition Through Material Memory, Aanchal Malhotra // untitled, Tito Merello Vilar // Courage, Anxiety and Despair, Watching the Battle, James Sant // Midnight Mass (1x5) // The Clockwork Prince, Cassandra Clare // currently unknown 

[dontbotherwiththepronunciation]

have you done a falia yet, for your photos?

save yourself cringefail girlloser save yourself

(Sources: "The final straw" by Nival_Vixen, "Beast Meridian" by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Louise Bourgeois' "The Hour Is Devoted to Revenge", "It's different for girls" by Of Montreal, "The Penitent Saint Mary Magdalene")

[kvothes]

✨sealey challenge reading list✨

as threatened: what i want to read in august for the sealey challenge. but first, a few thoughts:

i’m not going to truly and fully follow the challenge; 31 poetry books in 31 days means i spend very little time with each one, and i like to read more deeply. so i’m chipping away at some of my backlog, and rereading a few things that feel relevant, and also including some theory.

this is my personal list. it’s very informed by what i’m reading / curious about lately. this is not meant as a primer for anyone else, but please do take all of these as recommendations.

poetry

finish zong!, m. nourbese philip

lunch poems, frank o’hara (dreamt abt him recently)

i do everything i’m told, megan fernandes (met her recently) ✔️

beast meridian, vanessa angélica villarreal (met her recently)

the reckoning of jeanne d’antietam, matthew robert moore ✔️

almost obscene, raúl gómez jattin ✔️

eyes bottle dark with a mouthful of flowers, jake skeets (reread) (met him recently)

crush, richard siken (reread) ✔️

please make me pretty, i don’t want to die, tawanda mulalu (reread)

theory

read a lecture or two from madness, rack, and honey by mary ruefle ✔️

“my black joy is my primary aesthetic,” robin coste lewis

“a poem is a walk,” a. r. ammons

“the rejection of closure,” lyn heijinian

“some notes on organic form,” denise levertov

“projective verse,” charles olson

[notfatenotchance]

“The body is a haunted terrain—a living record of personal, familial, social, and epigenetic memory. To look at my father’s body now—the way he shuffles when he walks, the atrophy in his once-nimble fingers, the nerve pain in his feet, the cloudiness in his eyes as he loses his sight—it too is a record of a forgotten life, and of the systems that failed it. I carry the memory of him in his splendor and his decline. And what I carry of him is also connected to the land, its seam connecting memory, legacy into the future. Memory itself is a kind of map, linked to textures, smells, songs, places, the act of remembering in and of itself a kind of haunting. Music is one of the few portals I have into my fragmented memory, and writing the only way I know to recover my people from the nothing of forgetting, to resist the erasure of the border and its constant overwriting of history, to salvage what is disappearing.”

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, from “La Cancion de la Nena,” Oxford American (Summer 2021)

[loneberry]

First peonies of the season. Just got out of an impressive zoom dissertation defense for the brilliant Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. These USC creative writing PhD students are so strong and accomplished I’m not sure why they even need me, ha.

Now I’m at urgent care because…

COVID, again. Should be fine except I’m waiting to see a doctor to make sure my weird COVID eye infection isn’t orbital cellulitis, which apparently can make you blind or travel to your brain. I used to be neglectful of health stuff but now I prefer to err on the side of caution. UPDATE: eye prob doesn't seem serious. Still annoyed COVID has thrown a wrench into my exercise + writing flow state.

I’ve just been convalescing, watching experimental Hungarian animation (will post later) and reading. Also reeling from the sad news coming out of Rafah.

Depraved monsters dropping bombs on a refugee camp of displaced civilians. No words.

[callmeanxietygirl]

💬 SELENA: THE SERIES MISSES THE OPPORTUNITY TO DIVE INTO THE SINGER’S COMPLEX IDENTITY AND HER INFLUENCES FROM BLACK CULTURE

🎤 Citing Michael and Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Jody Watley, and Whitney Houston as her primary influences, Selena found Black music aspirational, a standard to live up to and an origin to credit. Selena’s life cannot be portrayed without Blackness.

🎶 Selena’s love of Black disco, pop, and R&B was formative, but in the television version of her life, it is only ever depicted as a desire to “cross over,” a metaphor for the striving immigrant ready to assimilate—the American Dream.

🫱🏾‍🫲🏿 Her Black influences are never used as opportunities to engage the deeper, more complex topic of why Mexican-American children of immigrants might more readily identify with Black culture than Mexican culture, and how it might speak to their social, political, and geographic displacement and alienation.

✏️ Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

🗓 Dec 10, 2020

💻 HarpersBazaar.com

⚠️ @SelenaIceberg had no involvement in the creation of this article.

#Selena #SelenaQuintanilla #SelenaQuintanillaPerez #ComoLaFlor #SelenaForever #SelenaYLosDinos #Texas #Houston #SanAntonio #CorpusChristi