Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Sotelo walks the line between autobiography and myth-making. These poems explore femininity, history, love, and what it means to be an artist.
What's most refreshing about this collection is that the women whose voices are rendered so beautifully here, not just the daughters and mothers but even Ariadne herself, shatter stereotypes of femininity and highlight truths that might discomfort but are a vivid testament to the world we live in today ... With candor and humor, Sotelo has given voice to women not often seen in the pages of American literature and has revealed in innovative ways the messiness that often characterizes relationships. Virgin heralds an important new voice in the world of poetry.
Sotelo’s poetry reveals the weight of desire, how our hearts drag our bodies ... Sotelo mines the Marian paradox with complexity, grace, and power ... Her narrators want more out of life, but they clench what they have—and draw us back to her pages. A significant debut.
Sotelo’s poems tend to blend together, partly thanks to her fondness for I-statements ... Paradoxically, self disappears behind self-reference, and 'I' has a blurring effect, as if we’re driving too fast through a landscape to take much in. But Sotelo’s best poems are also first person ... Slowing down, she relays experience without evasive disjunction or false coherence. Sotelo’s complicated ambivalence about men who 'still love girls, but rarely admit it' is disturbing and authentic.
