About the Poet:
Cloud Delfina Cardona is a writer and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the 2020 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and the past is a jean jacket, winner of the Naomi Shihab Nye First Book of Poetry Award. She has received support from Letras Latinas, the Academy of American Poets, Latinx in Publishing, and the Macondo Writers Workshop. She is the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a literary nonprofit that publishes Texan voices.
APR: Tell us about your recent work.
Cloud Delfina Cardona: It’s been almost a year since the release of my debut poetry collection, the past is a jean jacket (Hub City Press), a bildungsroman set in San Antonio. The collection grapples with growing up queer while navigating societal and cultural expectations from a Mexican-American family. I wanted to speak to the loneliness, the isolation, the self-hate, the longing, and the beauty that comes with growing up as a queer Tejana. In between these poems about my upbringing, I write towards the women I admire, ancestry, pop culture, friendship, my own complicated relationship to gender, and of course, longing. That’s the running line in my work— a longing for what has passed, what never was, and writing towards what could be.
I set out to try to write the book I needed to read as a teenager. I write my poems in hopes that they make others also feel a little less lonely.
APR: Share a 3-10 line excerpt from one of your poems that you feel encapsulates your style.
CDC: Here’s the last four couplets from my poem, “sometimes it strikes me and my body is on fire”
to be honest, i wasn’t even my happiest in
these times. why am i nostalgic for
the shitty times in my life? nostalgic for
addiction? addicted to nostalgia?
i hate using these vague words like addiction
and nostalgia. i’ve been taught to show, not tell.
but i need to ask you this: how do you accept
that your life is your life?
APR: What themes or ideas do you find yourself returning to in your poetry?
CDC: My poetry often returns to a desire to feel less alone. I think it’s very easy for me to feel isolated and get lost in my feelings, so I write to illuminate my experience and with the desire that it will bring solace to others as well. I’m also inspired by how Frank O’Hara detailed his days in New York, and aim to do the same but with San Antonio. Texas continues to haunt my poems.
APR: Who are some poets or writers who have influenced you?
CDC: My north star poets will always be Sharon Olds, Dorothea Lasky, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Langston Hughes, Ada Limon, Emily Dickinson, and June Jordan. Lately, I’ve been drawn to contemporary poets including: Diannely Antigua, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Alan Chazaro, Jan Beatty, Saúl Hernández, and Diane Seuss.
Also I have to shout out my father, Jacinto Jesús Cardona, who writes with a love of language, specifically caló, and helped pave the way for me to write about my Tejana experiences.
APR: What are you hoping to explore in your writing next?
CDC: Over the past year I’ve followed my obsession with Anti-Mexican violence in Texas during the 20th century. I’ve been making my way through Monica Muñoz Martinez’s The Injustice Never Leaves You, and writing poems towards the Blackwell School and the Porvenir massacre.
Additionally, I’m writing towards my matriarchal lineage that has roots in San Antonio since the mid 1800s. I’m Tejana to the bone. But at the same, I have such a complicated relationship with Texas. It’s not an easy place to live in, especially if you’re marginalized in any way, but it has also given me so much. There’s so many people I love here. My collection-in-progress sits in the complications of this place.
