Murmuration Archives

In her bold new collection, Murmuration Archives, Felicia Zamora traverses overlapping orbits of an ancient Mesoamerican codex, lineage, and her stage two breast cancer treatment. "Desire brought me here," the voice confesses while studying the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, one of the only pre Columbian texts to survive the Spanish colonization of Mexico. Through interactions with the Codex, Zamora's "undulations" emerge-- preverbal, more-than-verbal, urges and responses to the document, while also undergoing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Spanning Chichén Itzá to the Vatican Apostolic Library, to the Popol Vuh, to the exam room, to the Tōnalpōhualli, to the infusion center, to Xibalbá, these poems attune to the ancestral, ontological, anatomical, and environmental gaps left in the wake of violence, to create imaginative bridges of homecoming, belonging, and futurity that wormhole centuries together in a present pulse. Zamora's poetry reminds us that the body is the first archive, as she melds the rawness of cancer with the empowerment of finding the self in the voices of the ancestors. Docupoems reveal the body as a site of channeling, site of liberation, and site of occupancy where ruins, joy, lineage, illegibility, grief, and disease live restlessly intertwined. "Reminders how the body sings despite." Murmuration Archives is a love poem todescendants of ancient Mesoamerica and cancer survivors--illuminating the primordial collective inside each of us.

Felicia Zamora is the author of seven books of poetry including Interstitial Archaeology (University of Wisconsin Press 2025), I Always Carry My Bones (University of Iowa Press 2021), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and Body of Render (Red Hen Press 2020), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. She's won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C.P. Cavafy Prize, Tomaz Salamun Prize, Wabash Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, Tin House, and Yaddo. Her poems appear in Alaska Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, The Nation, Orion, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, West Branch, and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for Colorado Review.