ONCE I LOVED A COWBOY - Chapbook

Stefania Gomez’s ballads are comfort food for my lonesome heart. Picture if Ada Limón and C.D. Wright made a very gay millennial poembaby. Compassionate big mood poems and next thing you know I’m knee-jerk laughcrying oh wait no sobbing about Hannah Arendt and zits and kleptomanic roommates. ONCE I LOVED A COWBOY will noodle & strum & yeehaw its way into your heart.

-Noa/h Fields, author of WITH

In Once I Loved a Cowboy, time glows as if it is the only body that we must get close to. In these poems, of great care and wonder, Stefania Gomez writes of a distance between and through. Her words are honest in what they reveal of each other and of herself; her images, generous in what she trusts us to imagine. The lyric is patient, and this is the gift. The present is archived almost as quick as the past, and this drive that we are on—sometimes metaphorical, sometimes across state lines—proves there is no definite speed at which to language loss. In this pursuit, she calls to ghosts, to water, to winding landscapes, and anyone else that might know her name. Even us. Light is pink, light is summer, light is right here—until it is not; and what can be said for love? Perhaps, we are all like the cowboy, tossing a rope around something shining, lassoing even the things we cannot give. Or perhaps, as Gomez writes, “our paths, though they appear flat, straight, away, will come back around.”

-Shayla Lawz, Adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities & Media Studies, Pratt Institute