Dahlia Aguilar is a Texas-born Chicana poet who has made her home in Washington, D.C. for over three decades. A DC Arts and Humanities Fellow and alum of Macondo and Under the Volcano, she writes between tenderness and defiance—where humor and ache share a cup of coffee and memory refuses to behave. Her poems appear in Naugatuck River Review, Acentos Review, Boundless, and the award-winning anthology Somos Xicanas. Her manuscripts “La Otra Cara” and “Tidal Range” have been finalists for national awards. She lives in Deanwood with her teenage son, two dogs, and menopause. @acocotli
PRAISE:
In this debut chapbook, Dahlia Aguilar takes us on a nuanced word voyage that begins before the womb and moves through childhood and memory into the fragile terrain between daughterhood and motherhood, weaving a tejido de emociones shaped by family, longing, grief, and survival. Through musings on abuse and forgiveness, colorism and border identity, Espanglish and music, La Otra Cara confronts war and politics, reminding us that “self-doubt is colonial” and that even in grief, we are seeds, becoming. Aguilar offers a fierce meditation on identity, love, and the act of remembering—one that feels urgently necessary for our time and that resonates long after the final page.
–Ofelia Montelongo featured in The Rumpus, Latino Book Review, Los Acentos Review, and elsewhere; Macondista, 2019 Writer’s Center Fellow; PEN/Faulkner writer & PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow
When you read a book of poems you want those poems to touch you, to make you feel. In Dahlia Aguilar’s La Otra Cara each poem is a hand that reminds you how necessary touch is, how much memory it can hold, how a shift in pressure will change the tone, take you from comfort to threat, from exploration to invasion. The poems in this book weave in and out of beauty, pain, pleasure and loss with ease, each one a place to stop, sometimes to rest, sometimes to fight but always to feel.
–Samuel Miranda, artist, filmmaker and author of Protection from Erasure (Jaded Ibis Press), Departure (Central Square Press), and We Is (Zozobra Publishing); Executive Director of the American Poetry Museum
From the colibrí to her son to the memorializing of lives lost to genocide, the speaker of these poems moves between pleasure and burden with “one foot on the ground, the next pointing toward a new place, another realm of less remembering.” These are poems of preparation—for battle, for a lover’s embrace—animated by an attention that will not turn away from injustice. “I want the emptiness of the forest / Not empty at all”—here is the crow’s caw, the sensual frenzy of insects, and the music of a voice that knows when to say no and when to say yes, yes, yes.
—Dora Prieto of El Mashup Collective, 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
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