As part of a reading with UA’s Counseling Center about how to use creative writing to improve one’s mental health, I wrote an article including related prompts and techniques.
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Blue Moon Looming
Blue Moon Looming won runner-up in CutBank‘s Chapbook Contest and was named a Top Ten Latinx Debut by Latino Stories.
Blue Moon Looming is an ungovernable book of poems, where guns are hidden in bibles & in the middle of chaos, there is always a moon or a comet glittering in the landscape. Javier Sandoval is a poet for the unruly, the untidy, and yes, the brilliant among us.
—José Olivarez, author of Promises of Gold, nominated for the National Book Award.This is a poetry of rapture, feral and unflinching in its sardonic elegies but also its transcendent celebration of the forgotten, the unsung, even the mystical and the sublime. Poised between anecdote, myth-making, confessional storytelling and cinematic imagism, these poems sing from love, despair and ecstasy into that everlasting beyond.
—Cyril Wong, poet and two-time recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize.Blue Moon Looming – Personal Package
Comes with: – Autographed & personalized copy – Sticker of the cover – Free shipping
$15.00
To pay via Venmo or Zelle: send payment and shipping address to 919 357 8870.
media coverage & interviews
Top Ten Debut Latinx Authors in 2024 | Latino Stories
Author Spotlight: Javier Sandoval | Letras LatinasSandoval’s poems are fire, with innovative forms and a striking voice we all need to hear precisely because of its singularity in the contemporary poetry world.
—Jose Hernandez Diaz, NEA Poetry Fellow and author of Bad Mexican, Bad American.I can’t forget the arresting images and sounds—all the music—in Blue Moon Looming. Sandoval takes us on a journey across miles and miles of land and personal histories, along with a journey of the cerebral. Come be enchanted and sink into this collection, too..
—Natalie Lima, Assistant Professor at Butler University and essayist published in The Offing, Guernica, & Longreads.Sandoval’s poems move like a morning sun, as if not wanting to forget its dreams. Like not wanting to stop dreaming. He takes us in a graceful ride across stories, moments, and people he loves, reminding us about the songs we carry and that … what the old riders sing, I ride. And I ride along the horizon when I sing.
—Alejandro Jimenez, emmy-nominated poet and Mexican National Poetry Slam Champion.
Click to expand and read!
In its sounds, smells, reminisces, and echoes of an indigenous past, Sandoval’s Blue Moon Looming is redolent of a desert barrio we may not know intimately, but which becomes luminous in his recounting of it, in all its unsparing fallenness and glory. Sandoval is a standout poet and writer of the next generation!
—Ruben Degollado, author of The Family Izquierdo, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.A midnight camp-fire western noir rendered on the page so vividly and so stylishly, weaving epic tales of the personal and the communal through a cascading chorus of contemporary kins and ancestral ghosts. Provocative and triumphant spell-binding work.
—Edward Gunawan, poet and film producer, twice honored as Thailand’s Best Foreign Film entry for the Academy Awards.
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How to Submit Poems to Literary Magazines: Or, Lessons From My Year of 100 ‘Slaps’ (Rejections)
To get in the habit of submitting, I decided this year to get at least 100 rejections from reputable literary magazines. With some helpful tips from friends and other successful writers, I was able to submit enough to get those 100 ‘slaps’ (but also more acceptances than ever before). Here are the top lessons I learned from this experience (and from being Poetry Editor for Black Warrior Review where I read tons of cover letters & poetry submissions).
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Long-listed for Manchester Poetry Prize
Thank you to Manchester Metropolitan University for long-listing me in the Manchester Poetry Prize! Two long-listed poems will be in my upcoming chapbook, Blue Moon Looming, forthcoming 2024 by CutBank Books.
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En la cocina before Mass | Good luck hiding it
These two poems were originally published in Querencia Press: Autumn 2022 Anthology. Click to expand and read!
Javier Sandoval 