Description
Forthcoming Spring 2025.
Chelsea Guevara’s Cipota breathes a lineage into a song—making music of ancestral memory: dirges of heartbreak and generational trauma, anthems of rage and reclamation, ballads of love and homecoming.
Guevara’s voice enchants as she delves into history, ancestry, and the self—reaching for a lineage that has been battered by strife and strangled by colonialism. She moves through place and memory with deft skill and earnest humanity. Cipota examines the grief of culture lost, of a home you’ve been separated from, one that doesn’t truly feel like yours.
Cipota is a beating heart that demands to be heard. You will be rapt from start to finish.
Awards
Winner of the 2024 Womxn of the World Poetry Slam
Praise for Chelsea Guevara
“‘Cipota’ means ‘girl’ in Salvadoran Spanish, but Lord knows these poems are full-grown—delivered with the power of a woman determined to buck intergenerational curses and protect her most endangered kin. Few poets can dream of reaching Chelsea’s natural charisma and vulnerability on the stage. With Cipota, Chelsea has earned one of the top spots in the current generation of Central American writers demanding our space and specificity not just in latinidad and poetry but the world.”
—Willy Palomo, author of Wake the Others, a winner of the Foreword Indie Prize in Poetry
About Chelsea Guevara
Chelsea Guevara is a U.S.-Salvadorian poet from Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2024, she won the Womxn of the World International Poetry Slam, becoming the first Salvadoran and the first Utahn to earn a national individual slam title…. MORE
