Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of the poetry collection Last Train to the Midnight Market. She is the recipient of a Kundiman Poetry Fellowship and the inaugural John S. and James L. Knight Fellowship at Florida International University. She currently serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair, cofounding editor of Print-Oriented Bastards, and producer for The Working Poet Radio Show. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, Narrative Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals.

Hour of the Ox

By Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Winner of the 2015 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, Hour of the Ox received the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Crystal Ann Williams, who called it “a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender.” Cancio-Bello examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.