Veronica Corpuz is a poet and interdisciplinary artist who explores themes of identity, assimilation, loss, and grief. A workshop facilitator in the Madwomen in the Attic program at Carlow University, she co-curates with Sarah Williams Devereaux Mad Bookends, a digital bulletin of creative writing by women writers of color. In addition, she is one of 13 womenartists in the #notwhite collective and the poet-in-residence of Anthropology of Motherhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she resides.
PRAISE:
The Widow’s Calendar shows us a new way to keep time inside the rooms of the heart. Withincredible bravery as a woman of color in unforgiving circumstance, Corpuz mourns the loss ofher beloved. Her stunning lines transcend the language of days, opening the reader: My startledhappiness/to be holding you…After the pages of this book, we live in a new air, an air of stillbody and sorrow maps, breathing the new country.
–Jan Beatty, Dragstripping,University of Pittsburgh Press
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What stands out most in Veronica Corpuz’s breathtaking collection: every word is heart-felt,heart-crafted, intimate and precise, fearlessly exploring the unseen journey of caretaking, grief,and emergence. Her powerful images layer, transform, call and respond to each other inbittersweet ways—a beloved rocking chair vs. a respiratory treatment chair; a husband’s favoritefruit at once a measurement for a fetus and a tumor. Corpuz deftly guides us to float non-linearlyamong this narrator’s memories and dreams, but she never leaves us adrift, always settling us inthe physical: an orchid“undresses her blooms;” the inside of a husband’s cheek conjures“thetenderness of raw lamb.” These poems constantly move us and the narrator towards release—ofletting go of grief, but never of love.
–Sarah Williams-Devereux, author of Of a Mother (Finishing Line Press, 2023), a finalist in FLP’s 2022 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition
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