"...it's better for all of us to be amazing than for just one me to be amazing / I wasted my youth on the flat breath of others / Until all of a sudden I stopped performing." Material is a book with no place to hide, offering a mature rendering of how experience cuts as it sculpts. The unapologetic female speaker explores different ways strength manifests in the roles of artist, wife, daughter, and mother -- and how recorded and parsed observation can be a form of both protest and care. In her second collection, Ana Maria Caballero delivers honest, edgy, and exquisitely crafted explorations of how we seek to balance the multiple roles and responsibilities that call to us, all the while preserving our wild, creative, imperfect selves.
About the Author :
Ana María Caballero is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist and poet whose work critically examines how biology shapes cultural structures, particularly gendered ideals of sacrifice. Through a practice spanning poetry, performance, sculpture, and installation, Caballero explores memory and the evolution of the book in the contemporary and digital world. Caballero's fusion of literature and technology has positioned her at the forefront of digital poetry. She co-founded theVERSEverse, a digital poetry gallery, and became the first living poet to sell a poem at Sotheby's. She's exhibited at leading museums, including HEK Basel, the Francisco Carolinum, Museo Miguel Urrutia, the Ashmolean Museum, and Mad Arts Museum. She's performed at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Art Basel, Art Genève, and Fundación Juan March. Her works have appeared in Artnet, Art Newspaper, Poetry International, BOMB, El País, and NPR. In 2025, she was named a top 50 Latin Woman to Follow by Forbes. She's the author of 6 books and a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Literature Prize, and Colombia's José Manuel Arango Poetry Prize, among other literary recognitions.
Review :
"Ana María Caballero's Material twists between the biological and social spaces women inhabit, and raises a feminist paradox-the demand to be present in multiple spaces-in one body. These poems are corpus both in bleeding body and art-making: "the world of the body and the world of the mind brought together on page." Mother, poet, friend, lover, and wife vie for energy after the exhaustion of each role's attending labors. Public ceremonies and committees fade to private fears and grief while Caballero holds a steady mirror. Formally evocative, with language that sears and sculpts, Material is a splendid testimony of poetry's ability to occupy love and grief, self and other, artist and art."
-RACHEL MORGAN, author of Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey, Final Thursday Press
"In Material, Ana Maria Caballero's roving female intelligence gathers the felt and seen into an eager, energetic embrace. The poems screen the illuminations of a mother/wife/sister against a swirl of Elmo meditations, black crystals, growing tumors, exposed genitals, and breakfast tables. Caballero uses words to outrun the chaos while trying to chase it down. Her writing engages in a kind of hunt: compulsory, therapeutic, and not without danger. Caballero brings the reader along, asking only that they hold tight when she refuses to turn away from the kill. A brave, bracing collection."
-BOO TRUNDLE, Editor in Chief, Atticus Review
"Caballero, perhaps best known as a leading light in the digital poetry community, offers, with her latest collection, something unexpected: a collection that is the antithesis of the digital world-poetry that explores the messiness and fleshiness of domestic life. Our boredoms, fears, and mundanity are on full display in Caballero's imagination, which is unflinching and bold."
-MARY SUTTON, Editorial Director, Academy of American Poets Magazine
"What are the systems that shelter us? What happens when these systems fail us? In her remarkable book, Material, Ana María Caballero graces us with the complex meeting of tender love and heart-rending loss, skillfully describing how a woman arrives at a place of mourning in one's body while living a daily life. With lines of surgical precision, these poems vibrate with the power beneath them: what moves us to continue."
-JAN BEATTY, author of Dragstripping, University of Pittsburgh Press
