“In diaspora, one internalizes stories of a shared past in empowering and distressful ways. We exhaust our relationships struggling to perform health while anxious, depressed, and traumatized. I wrote this poem while thinking of my parents—my mother specifically. We left El Salvador under tragic circumstances, and yet here is this photo of valence, utter joy. I wanted to see how the American sonnet could be used to capture the complexity of a situation where the atomistic narrative of an individual’s responsibility to ‘get over’ pain meets the postnational context of a prolonged, transgenerational entanglement with exceptionalism, structural violence, and storytelling.”
—José Felipe Alvergue