Watcha by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal
Selected by Rosebud Ben-Oni
A multigenre, bilingual work of poetry, meditative prose, and photography, Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal’s debut collection Watcha (Deep Vellum, 2024) opens with candor and generosity toward both reader and subjects, deriving its intentions from Chicana composer Pauline Oliveros’s concept of Deep Listening: “I hope that Deep Watching by means of ekphrasis will enable celebration of communities.” Indeed, through Villarreal’s idea of Deep Watching, readers themselves are transformed by intertwining with poems that often forgo “I” in order to engage with a world that so often denounces—or worse, ignores altogether—art itself. If “seeing is involuntary” and “watching is voluntary,” as Villarreal points out, then we must move along within the poems like we have a real stake in the lives of the artists and work we deeply watch with them.
Each section opens with prose, guided by the “I” of the poet that explains process, personal history, and a range of ars poetica that often explores the connections between visual art and writing. To engage in Villarreal’s Watcha is to be alert, vigilant, careful as one “steps” into the next poem. For we are not meant to be still: “Stasis is impossible when so much fluctuates.” And so much does, carnal y carnala: from autorretratos as introspection, to queerness and the erotic (“self-portrait as a piggyback hummingbird on leaves in a bedroom”), to poet and reader becoming subject themselves to the art they seek to render into words: “The face of the sun is the mirror of your face, / of my face, of our face, de tu cara, de la mía, / de nosotres.”
