Christopher Soto
Photo by Kai Richards
Bio
Christopher Soto is a poet based in Los Angeles, California. He works at UCLA with the Ethnic Studies Research Centers and sits on the board of directors for Lambda Literary. He completed his MFA in Poetry at NYU, where he was a Goldwater Hospital Writing Fellow. He edited Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books) and his debut poetry collection is forthcoming. His poems, reviews, interviews, and articles can be found at the Nation, the Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and more. He co-founded the Undocupoets Campaign, co-led the Writers for Migrant Justice Campaign, and he is currently co-organizing efforts to abolish the police from university campuses.
There are three main craft choices, which are central to the poetry that I have submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts. First, the insistence on the “we” pronoun. This pronoun serves as a rebuttal to American isolationism and the idea that police violence occurs only to individuals, and not to whole communities. This pronoun choice also positions the collection to be in conversation with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which used the “you” pronoun to heighten a sense of intimacy when discussing race relations. Secondly, these poems are void of traditional punctuation and instead prefer to create their own punctuation from a double backslash. This new punctuation serves as a period, comma, semi-colon, and also as a way to heighten the poetic tensions that exist inside each line. This craft choice almost acts like a sibling to Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford, which abandons punctuation completely. Lastly, the tone of the manuscript is influenced by a punk literary aesthetic, which is often anti-state, sacrilegious, perverse, and flippant. In punk, the political importance of the concepts being discussed are almost undermined by the outlandish manner in which they are presented. As with other poets, one can listen to the music of their community in order to find a poem’s rhythm. For example, Langston Hughes had the blues of Harlem and Federico García Lorca had the ballads of Andalucia, Spain.