Invasive Species by Michelle Lizet Flores

“Mixing magic and street smarts as easily as English and Spanish, Michelle Lizet Flores gifts us with an intimate but unflinching exploration of the self and the many pasts that shape it. Her Cuban roots and female ancestors imbue her American life and children with a dense, palpable other-worldliness we are the richer for. These poems don’t simply celebrate: they show us how to conjure and animate into being a life fully present in all its timelessness.”

–Andres Rojas, author of Third Winter in our Second Country (Trio House Press, 2021).

“Invasive Species plants the reader like a frog on a Florida porch as the sky oranges, time passes, a mother passes, children are born, people pass, hurricanes come and go, the sky goes violet and days become many nights. How much peace we make in all that change depends on the type of lessons we gleaned and the character we were fortunate enough to forge over the fires of hard lessons. Flores teaches us ‘how to heal with words rather than herbs.’ If not handled correctly, the act of growing can feel invasive and chaotic. However, there is a calm and understood feeling of necessity in the pain that guides Flores’ words from poem to poem to beat to story to song. Invasive Species doesn’t capture a place, time, history, culture, and simply present it; it captures you, collects you, and keeps you in a jar with these places, people, times, etc. Flores presents Gothic Florida in a Cuban dress, says: ‘y que?’, and confirms ‘It’s a verifiable fact / that whiskey tastes best / when you drink it on your porch / while staring at an orange sky.’”

–C.L. “Rooster” Martinez, a San Antonio poet and author of A Saint for Lost Things (Alabrava Press, 2020), As it is in Heaven (Kissing Dynamite Press, 2020), and Mexican-Dinosaur (Write About Now Press, 2023).

“Michelle Lizet Flores’ Invasive Species contains the expansive magic required to dress the wounds of heartbreak and survival. Part vexed, Floridian pastoral, part ode to diasporic selfhood, this book enthralled me with its vivid voice, its persistent attention to a self always at odds with geography, familial inheritance, and grief’s long tenure. Rooted in hurricanes and heat, Flores invades a southern stillness—she runs the page. And in that surge, this book will upend how you look at the miracle of our temporary bodies, of motherhood and the fleeting moments that compose an undying kind of love. For me, Invasive Species illuminates the dark hallways of life—death and its inevitable lessons—and the conjuro needed to remake the world and to carry on. I invite you to encounter the exposed nerve of these deep roots; “the kind our abuelas taught us to boil, / the kind our children consume.”

–Jessica Q. Stark, author of Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020) and Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023).