a conversation with Ruben Quesada, author of Brutal Companion

"The poem is a gallery full of emotions and ideas; your guide is the music of diction and syntax."

Today is pub day for Ruben Quesada’s new poetry collection Brutal Companion! I’m excited to share the following conversation with Ruben about craft, intention, and visual art. I also have a review of Brutal Companion out today with Chicago Review of Books— it was truly a joy to spend time with this book this fall, and I hope you will enjoy doing the same!

SG Huerta: In addition to your poetry, I’m familiar with your work as a critic and editor, especially as a champion of Latinx and queer voices. Latinx Poetics, a book on craft that you edited, came out while I was finishing my MFA thesis, and it was invaluable to have at my side. What is the relationship between your work as a critic and work as a poet, and perhaps the overlap of Latinx Poetics and Brutal Companion?

Ruben Quesada: Latinx Poetics started coming together in 2020, and over the next two years, I wrote and revised my own poems. It was the pandemic that gave me time to complete the anthology of essays while not worrying about making ends meet. The time off allowed me to return and assemble the poems I’d written. Last year, I began organizing what would become Brutal Companion during my time at VCCA in Virginia. A few months later, I began sending it out to contests and publishers. I am grateful that the book has been read and responded to. It impresses me that this book was there for you. Thank you for sharing that with me. 

When I think about my poetry book, Brutal Companion, and my edited collection of essays, they share a focus on identity, culture, and details of the human experience. In both books, I try to showcase the multiplicity and depth of Latinx perspectives, questioning the idea of a single story and combining heritage with their reflection. My poems explore themes of memory, grief, and cultural displacement, which resonates with the essay's view of poetry as a tool for experiencing and responding to the world. I want to broaden the American literary landscape, constantly altering what it means to be a Latinx poet today.

SG: This is actually the first interview trans poetica is hosting about a poetry collection, so I’m excited to get a bit in the weeds about craft! One of the things that really stands out to me in your collection is the metaphors you use, like in the poem “My Mother is a Garden.” How do you approach metaphor? How do you know when you’ve crafted the right one for a particular poem? 

Ruben: That’s a question for the ages. I can’t wait to come back to this answer in the future to learn how much my opinion has changed. I’m always finding new ways to write that excite me. I find value in letting my poems sit after I’ve drafted them. How long? It varies. I want emotional distance, and the passage of time helps. 

Metaphors and similes are essential elements in all writing. It acts upon our emotions, sights, and sounds. Empathy—finding common ground or shared experiences that help bridge the gap between your perspective and theirs, is the best way to foster a connection. When I revisit a poem, I read it aloud. 

As I write, music begins to make itself known; this is when decorum is appropriate. The process of reading and writing occupies the body and mind like Mutlu Blasing's insights on lyric forms. Blasing’s theories explore how lyric forms function not just as a literary genre but also as a cognitive and emotional experience. The poem is a gallery full of emotions and ideas; your guide is the music of diction and syntax. 

SG: Reading this book feels like walking through an art gallery, so it was no surprise to read about the connection between your poetry and visual art in one of your newsletters. Can you talk more about your poetry’s relationship to visual art? Do you have a favorite ekphrastic poem in Brutal Companion? 

Ruben: I love your metaphor—the book is a gallery. I didn’t grow up with access to artwork like those in museums and I grew up before the Internet. My neighborhood streets weren’t always safe or accessible, but it became what I observed. My first book Next Extinct Mammal is concerned with those experiences that were formative to building the confidence to devote my life to poetry. 

Visual art teaches me to engage with ideas and emotions beyond my imagination. Recently, art critic Sebastian Smee wrote about the Cleveland Museum of Art Caravaggio’s “The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew,” which depicts “the brute, mortal reality of human bodies.” My poem about Raphael’s painting and Matthew Shephard, “East of Wyoming, I Remember Matthew Shepard” holds a deeper relationship. I spoke about it at Jentel Foundation at the Sheridan, Wyoming Public Library, this past spring.

Raphael’s “The Entombment,” 1507

Visual art is essential to learning language. Growing up bilingual, visual art taught me to recognize and memorize a word and its meaning. Like morning prayers—Sesame Street was always playing at my babysitter’s house in the early 1980s. Sesame Street sparked my curiosity about language and visual art.

SG: In another newsletter, you write that “these poems are not confessional; they are drawn from cultural and historical events and firsthand observations.” How do you make that distinction?

Ruben: Thank you for this question. What I value about reflecting on historical moments whether public or private is that they inform not just the present condition, but the culture in which I was raised. Although I use the lyric “I” these are poems whose subject moves away from the self.

I’m making a world of observations from the past and the present. At times, a private moment like “Watching Daniel V. Jones” becomes foregrounded through a live news broadcast and its impact on private lives. At other times, the imagination frames the death of actor Rock Hudson to contrast to a more intimate moment in “Shadows.” I’m drawing from things I know happened and with research those memories become clearer or more meaningful.  

SG: Brutal Companion is so aptly titled– these poems are tightly connected with other people, other writers, other artists. Who are you reading right now? 

Ruben: I think about these words every day—brutal and companion. The language in my poems ranges from academic to quotidian, just like subjects of the poems. I miss being on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle because it allowed me access to many books published in the year. 

Now, I buy used books or if a publisher or agency is kind enough to keep me on their galley list, I can read books as they come. I love it. In all fairness, I’ve spent more time writing and I’ve needed to do that for years. I’m re-reading Vanessa Angélica Villareal’s Magical/Realism and I have Nathan Osorio’s Querida on my desk. 

SG: Do you have any other projects on the horizon?

Ruben: I’ve been writing poems that recast a Latin American myth about a cured woman into a flight attendant in the mid-twentieth century. I’ve taken the characters from these poems and written a libretto and play adapted from these poems. I’m collaborating with a local musician to put my libretto to music. I want to work on projects that bridge language and visual arts. 

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Ruben Quesada is editor of the award-winning anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, The Believer, Harvard Review and elsewhere. His recent collection of poetry, Brutal Companion, won the Barrow Street Editors Prize.

Order Brutal Companion here, and check out the details for tomorrow’s virtual book launch below:

Check out past trans poetica interviews here! Feel free to get in touch if you want to collaborate in any way.

Thanks for reading this far! Some notes for readers old and new: trans poetica will always be free, tips are always appreciated, and viva viva Palestina