A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship

José Nicolás Cabrera-Schneider is currently pursuing Ph.D. studies in Latin American Studies (Tulane University). Nico has published two books of short stories: No Importa Saber (Folio 114, 2003) and Cuéntame tu día (Cazam Ah, 2016). His novels are: El detective Juan B’atz’: Tarjeta Roja (Cazam Ah, 2017), El detective Juan B’atz’: El Tigre (Cazam Ah, 2019) and El detective Juan B’atz’: La Sobrina (Cazam Ah, 2020). Nico’s poetry was included in California’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology (Z Publishing, 2017). His translation of Ariel Francisco’s poetry book was published by Burrow Press (2020). Visit his website, nicocabsch.com. Twitter: @JulajujIx

Ryan Rivas is the Publisher of Burrow Press and the Coordinator of MFA Publishing at Stetson University. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and elsewhere.

Ariel Francisco is a poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami. His previous poetry collection is All My Heroes Are Broke. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Poetry Review. In Francisco’s A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship (Burrow Press) the speakers in these hilarious and melancholy poems depict a rich and varied emotional landscape. They imagine themselves standing on ocean garbage patches, contemplate the crabgrass on traffic medians, and envision the beauty of a submerged Miami Beach. In one moment the strange becomes familiar, only to become strange again in the next stanza. Francisco’s second book of poems deals with climate change and the absurdities and difficulties of being a millennial Latinx in the Sunshine State. (This first edition includes side-by-side Spanish translations by José Nicolás Cabrera-Schneider.) Poet Richard Blanco praised it noting that ”Part satirist, part ecopoet, part elegist, but every bit a luminous poet, Ariel Francisco brilliantly voices the complex intersections of the physical, emotional, and natural landscapes that define our sense of place and belonging, as well as our feelings of alienation and ennui.”