Mammal is the title poem from Caballero’s book MAMMAL, which won the 2022 US National Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and was a semifinalist for the 2023 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize.
Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them–without romanticism or preciousness.
This performative work honors Caballero’s explorations of the tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to attempt to contain it.
Photography by Luis Gaspar.