"...it's better for all of us to be amazing than for just one me to be amazing / I wasted my youth on the flat breath of others / Until all of a sudden I stopped performing." Material is a book with no place to hide, offering a mature rendering of how experience cuts as it sculpts. The unapologetic female speaker explores different ways strength manifests in the roles of artist, wife, daughter, and mother -- and how recorded and parsed observation can be a form of both protest and care. In her second collection, Ana Maria Caballero delivers honest, edgy, and exquisitely crafted explorations of how we seek to balance the multiple roles and responsibilities that call to us, all the while preserving our wild, creative, imperfect selves.
