M. SOLEDAD CABALLERO
Flight Plan
Coming September 2 with Red Hen Press
Pre-Order from Red Hen Press, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop
Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.
This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after.
— Carmen Giménez, author of Be RecorderI was held in suspense and awe as I read these poems.. This much anticipated second book is a must-read for anyone living or experiencing life in the “in between.”
—Jasminne Mendez, author of City Without Altar
I Was A Bell
available now from Red Hen Press
“Soledad Caballero gives soaring voice to the ways history, memory, and the collective weight of our disappeared live silenced, but never unheard, in our bodies and hearts. It’s hard to express how much these poems made unnamed parts of me feel seen.”
– Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home
and Chasing the Sun
“Caballero bears unflinching witness to the emotional trauma inherited from war-ravaged Chile to the exiled plains of Oklahoma. As though to witness is to love. These poems negotiate the transitions of language, memory, country, her battle with cancer, counterbalancing the violence from which she fled, with a transformative devotion to details.”
– Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet
AWARDS & RECOGNITION
2022 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award One Author – English: International Latino Book Awards
2022 Outstanding Book: International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry
2022 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Winner: Independent Book Publishers Association
2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award Winner: Chosen by Allison Joseph - from Red Hen Press
8 Debut Poetry Collections by Poets over 40: Electric Literature
M. Soledad Caballero is a poet and professor. She is a Macondo, CantoMundo, and StoryKnife fellow, winner of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts’ 2019 Joy Harjo poetry prize and the 2020 SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest. She’s been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Ninth Letter, and other venues. Her essays have been published in The Hopkins Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere.
I Was a Bell (2021) won Red Hen Press’s 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year, and was a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. Her second collection, Flight Plan, will also be published by Red Hen. She is an avid TV watcher and a terrible birder.