Ana María Caballero is an award-winning Colombian-American poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores embodiment, memory, care, and the cultural ethics of emerging technologies, while reimagining poetry and the book for contemporary and digital worlds.
Caballero is the author of eight books. Her first book of poetry, Entre domingo y domingo, received Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and was rereleased by Valparaíso Press in 2023; an Italian translation was published by Edizioni Ensemble in 2025. Her books A Petit Mal (nonfiction) and Mammal (poetry) received the International Beverly Prize and the Steel Toe Books Award in Poetry, respectively. Her forthcoming poetry collection, Material, received Trio House Press’ Editors Choice Award and will be published in 2026. Her debut novel, Cuts, received the 2025 Clay Reynolds Prize from Texas Review Press.
Just as cherry blossoms peek out against the sky, I chatted with Ana María Caballero about the materials that create life, the idea of gendered sacrifice, and where humor emanates from.
Cynthia Via: How did you get into writing poetry? Was this always a part of your life?
Ana María Caballero: I began writing poetry seriously when I was twelve. I say “seriously” because that’s when I noticed I had a writing problem: I’d write poems in the back of my school journals and fill them up so quickly, I’d need to bike to the drugstore to get new ones. I knew, then, in seventh grade, in line at the drugstore, that I was a writer.
CV: That’s a good problem to have.
How does your experience in performance, sculpture and art installation, influence your poems, and how has it expanded your writing with this most recent collection?
AMC: I’m constantly thinking about ways my poems can occupy physical space, not just the rectangle of the page. I envision language thriving in three-dimensional materiality while remaining true to its essence, to readability, to the possibility of personal interpretation, to open-ended ambiguity. Depending on the setting, these can become complicated considerations.
CV: What was the thought process behind the title of the collection, Material?
AMC: Life itself is material. Much of my work is about zooming in on the small, daily exchanges we don’t consider important and finding the hidden layers of significant conflict, of systemic patterns, of subtle subjugation that become mass, matter, material for art.
CV: What was the intention behind the different sections and the placement of those poems? What do the titles represent?
AMC: I wanted to organize the book in a way that was at once surprising and intuitive. I worked with a wonderful editor, Jan Beatty, who helped me orchestrate the flow. We landed on a structure that moves the reader forward while causing them to stop in their tracks and take a moment to read closely. Kris Bigalk from Trio also helped adjust the flow in the book’s final review.
There’s a section on more political poems, for example, but a few works invite us to think about how the political manifests beyond current events and headlines, about how power affects the ways our bodies move through the world. Subliminal, systemic influences limit our daily experiences, especially as women.
There’s also a consideration for long versus short forms. I include an essay woven into one of the shorter poem sections, for example, so that we can consider the kick of prosaic vis à vis the punch of brief.
The titles come from the poems themselves, but when these same words are taken out of context their meaning expands. Even within the same collection, language’s shapeshifting ability is laid bare.
CV: A few of these poems reference the landscape of motherhood, which resonated with me. What has this landscape revealed about writing while “mothering”?
AMC: I write to reveal myself to myself. There’s no final word on motherhood. There are millions and millions of individual experiences, each equally valid. I believe these experiences create meaningful connections when we’re honest about them. I hope that in being honest myself, I invite others to also be honest.
CV: While reading “Bedtime” and “The Many-Headed Thing,” I thought about the sacrifices women make as mothers. Is there something to be gained creatively from sacrifices of the body and the time given?
AMC: I don’t think sacrifice is a virtue. That’s, verbatim, the subtitle for my most recent book, Mammal: Sacrifice is not a virtue. There are idealized notions of gendered sacrifice. Women should do more, we should put ourselves second, the child, its care, the home comes first. The same doesn’t apply to other genders. I don’t think it’s helpful to view sacrifice through the lens of personal growth, but rather through the lens of personal empowerment, as it regards resisting this notion if it doesn’t serve our lives.
CV: Some of your poems struck me as being slightly humorous or sardonic, especially the endings. Where does this type of humor come from?
AMC: Late-night shows hinge on making fun of things that are not funny. Through laughter, we’re able to process traumatic moments. Through humor, we face dark truths, come close to them, examine them, perhaps even deal with them. We laugh, but there’s a crying to that laughing.
CV: The poem, “The Committee Announces a Sequel,” contains language alluding to a digital object. What was the intentionality behind this poem, and where do these images come from?
AMC: Of course, there’s no literal gadget. The poem makes fun of our society, where we think we can fix everything by hitting reset. Turn it on and turn it off, and it’ll work again. I poke fun but, at the end of the day, the situation is not funny. The speaker keeps going. It’s the dark edge of humor that allows us to come close to things that are true and hurtful.
CV: You also write about odd moments that some people might consider taboos. For example, in the poem “I’m bleeding” and “You Still Shower with Your ten-year -old.” Why are these important moments to highlight?
AMC: Writing these poems wasn’t necessarily a political choice. Rather I wanted to register moments I treasured. I wish my son, who is going on fourteen, was ten again, and we could have that moment of sweetness and tenderness, which is gone for the rest of our lives. Now there’s only the adolescent push and pull.
CV: It’s always interesting to read intimate moments. You’re like, should I be reading this? But maybe that’s the point of not just art, but poetry to show you something that other people may not be willing to share.
AMC: Verse doesn’t have to be confessional for it to be effective, but I do feel it needs to be true. When poetry is too abstract, inscrutable, generalized or removed from personal experience, it falls flat on its face.
CV: You speak about how every reading of a text is its own world? How readers interpret that text can be very different depending on the environment. What are you hoping readers will receive from this text when they receive it in this form?
AMC: When people read my work, they often come out thinking: Hey, I’m not alone. That’s a very powerful feeling, communion through text and through reading. I hope this continues.
CV: The poem, “They’ll Become Objects” made me sad, because at the end of the day, we all become photos, stored away in a dusty closet. How do we not become objects? Is it a cold thing to end up as nothing more than photographs?
AMC: Borges said we forget we’re hanging out with corpses. We forget we’re mortal, and all of us are going to disappear. It’s not a matter of it being depressing or fatalistic but rather appreciating the time we have in a more deliberate way because of this knowledge. To use our evanescence as empowerment.
CV: I can definitely see that.
Even though this collection has influences from the digital world, we are also reminding readers of the humanity we’re leaving out. In “Items I Scour The Internet To Find,” why were these words important to surface as a distinction from what technology is usually meant for?
AMC: We think that these meaningful exchanges occur in the flesh and blood world, but they also come from online interactions. This poem acknowledges the fleshiness of virtual space.
CV: Yea, and it doesn’t just have to be about doom scrolling.
Any book recommendations?
AMC: I’m a big fan of Louise Glück, Julie Marie Wade, P. Scott Cunningham, Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath. Rachel Morgan is a wonderful poet as well. Jan Beatty, another wonderful writer.
