Buy: Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn by Angela Acosta | Dancing Girl Press | October 2024 | $10
What are some key themes present in your book?
Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (Dancing Girl Press, 2024) is a poetry chapbook that explores themes related to belonging, language learning and identity development in English and Spanish, education, mistaken assumptions, and family journeys. As a self-proclaimed “fourth generation Chicana unicorn,” my poetry is a celebration of learning about one’s heritage and forging connections with others of the Latin American diaspora in the United States.
Can you describe the environment(s) where you wrote your book? This could be the room, the desk, the city, an MFA program, a fellowship, or any other environmental factor (you only wrote when it rained, you always wrote with fresh flowers in the room, etc.).
Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn was written in many places, starting in 2019 when I published the earliest poem from this collection, “Spanish Fluency / La fluidez en español” in ¿Qué Pasa, Ohio State? For me, these poems show the journey I have taken in my twenties, from being a graduate student at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio to graduating with a doctorate in Spanish and going out in the world to become a professor. A lot of things were changing around me as I wrote each poem, from candidacy exams to Day of the Dead celebrations, and these poems were the one thing that stayed constant.
I didn’t have plans for creating a collection when I first started writing these poems and submitting some of them to magazines. That said, the idea of chronicling my journey learning about and teaching Spanish and Latin American, Latinx, and Spanish culture stayed with me until it all came together as one magical, Chicana unicorn.
What is your current obsession? Short lines, slant rhymes, couplets, trees, etc.
I absolutely cannot get enough of writing prose poetry. There’s something about the challenge to write a prose poem without the usual signposts of line breaks that really appeals to me. It still takes some getting used to, but prose poetry invites me to think about the writing process from a different perspective.
What type of poet do you classify yourself as?
When sit down to write a poem, I envision the possibilities for human beings on Earth and among the stars. I consider myself first and foremost a speculative poet who mainly writes science fiction poetry, but I didn’t start out that way. You know, I read a lot of science fiction growing up (classics like Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury), and even read speculative poems in school without realizing it (Edgar Allen Poe, for one)! Everything clicked when I learned about speculative poetry, from dragons and fantasy to science fiction and spaceships and all the horror, slipstream, and fantastical poetry in between. My particular focus as a speculative poet when writing Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023) has been to ask philosophical questions about human lives among the stars, and chronicle what diverse futures await Latinx and Latin American communities in outer space. WhileFourth Generation Chicana Unicorn doesn’t lean much into the speculative, the search for one’s ancestral past rings just as true now as it will generations in the future as communities search for new home (worlds).
You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?
The opening lines from the first poem, “Monarch Butterfly,” in Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn is "The monarch butterfly begins as / la mariposa monarca down in México.”
The last lines in the final poem, “Doctora,” read:
The training may be complete, but the adventure
continues across many lifetimes.
Do you have any advice for new and emerging writers? Is there anything you wish you knew?
I’ve been writing since I was in high school, but figuring out how to navigate the submission process for poetry and flash fiction felt like swimming upstream. I’m sure there are plenty of writers who write in their spare time but may not be actively submitting their work or don’t quite know how to get started. Little by little, I found resources like Erica Verrillo’s lists of contests and literary magazines that are free to submit to, calls for submissions Facebook pages, Substacks for writers whose work I admire, and Discord servers. I wish that I had known about the whole literary magazine and publishing ecosystem sooner to get better acclimated to finding reputable journals.
William Carlos Williams is synonymous with plums. If you had to choose one fruit and one animal/plant/celestial body that would forever remind people of you, what would you choose and why?
What a great question! I think I’m going to have to say that my animal of choice would be the illusive “Chicana unicorn.” It feels like an apt metaphor for something that is rare yet assure of itself; the Chicana unicorn knows that it exists. The choice of mythical creature, for me, comes from living and going to school in places in the United States where being of Latin American descent is less common or where there aren’t large existing communities. As for fruits, I will choose the tomato as it’s technically a fruit and the base of so many dishes in many countries and cultures.
Angela Acosta, Ph.D. (she/her) is a bilingual Mexican American poet and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Utopia Award nominee. Her poetry has appeared in Copihue Poetry, The Acentos Review, Shoreline of Infinity, and Radon Journal. She is author of Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022), A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023), and Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (Dancing Girl Press, 2024).