Ariel Francisco

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.”