Portraits as Animal: Poems

Portraits as Animal is a gallery of self-becoming in a "sunbaked house as tiny as a heart." With a toothy lyricism at turns sly and forthright, Cárdenas's hunger to belong carries us from a stove "bleeding a hundred kinds of caldo" to his "determined mitochondrial ancestors''-a journey framed by generational struggles with addiction, a queerphobic church, and the always-transforming land.

In conversation with Taos's rich artistic tradition and the brutal, binding legacy of colonization, Cárd...