Ever since humans have had the urge to create, the most transcendent art has cut through alienation, separateness, and numbness by communicating truths that move us, make us feel more alive, and coax us into coming into union with humanity. In my mind, the purpose of poetry is to articulate the ineffable mysteries of the human experience and to render our familiar mundanity strange and extraordinary. In my work, I aim to do both by scrutinizing the timeworn topics of love and affection under a microscope lens that disrupts expectations and convention. I employ figurative language and my own experience as a Latina woman in the South to open realms of reverence in my poetry that I hope can move even the most jaded of readers. In a world that is inching ever closer to climate catastrophe and is subsumed in acts of inhumanity, I offer every poem I write as a prayer to the value of human, animal, and natural life and a protest against nihilism and cruelty.
Sophia Ordaz is a Chicana writer and master’s student in Comparative Literature based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her journalistic work and poetry have appeared in such publications as The Idle Class, Arkansas Soul, Slant Magazine, Oyez Review, and Evocations Review. She is the June 2022 Open Mouth poetry resident. You can reliably find her in a mosh pit, on her longboard, or in bed reading a book. She occasionally tweets at @krzykittensmile and rants and raves about music at @auralwhiplash on Instagram.