Flight Plan

M. Soledad Caballero, professor of English and co-chair of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Allegheny College, is a Macondo and CantoMundo fellow. Her collection I Was a Bell (Red Hen Press, 2021) won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. I Was a Bell was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year and a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. She is an avid TV watcher and a terrible birder. She splits her time between Pittsburgh and Meadville, Pennsylvania.

M. Soledad Caballero’s Flight Plan is the compelling account of a ragged body in mid-flight to survival told through a cellular lyric. Caballero is a daughter who’s looking at the plot of history to “find more than bones.” This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after.—Carmen Giménez, author of Be RecorderM. Soledad Caballero’s second poetry collection, Flight Plan, is a meditation on the body: the immigrant body, aging body, female body, and bodies of land and water. In these poems, the body always exists in a gray space, in the middle. Caballero’s poems often leave us hanging in midair where everything exists in the pause between here and there, then and now. I was held in suspense and awe as I read these poems that often left me feeling like I was hovering in midair, or wading in water between countries, or diagnosis, waiting for the literal or figurative plane to crash—to be deported or for the cancer to return. Whether it is in her depiction of cancer as a “gray mamba so beautiful so deadly,” snaking its way into cells, or the description of her mother as “a mermaid with green eyes and a green voice,” Caballero masterfully uses visceral language and vivid imagery to hold space for both sorrow and hope, beauty and pain, the light and the dark, the water and the land. This much anticipated second book is a must-read for anyone living or experiencing life in the “in between.” —Jasminne Mendez, author of City Without Altar