Ruth Irupé Sanabria — Carne
2/27/202617 min
Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s delicious and dexterous “Carne” begins with these lines: “I've eaten pork from / pernil to chuletas to chitterlings.” And just in case you were wondering — and even if you’re not — the speaker goes on to list much more of the seafood, poultry, and animal parts that have been consumed and how they were cooked. Lest you think this poem is simply a meat-eater’s manifesto, savor its final turn towards what else the speaker is really hungry for.
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Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s first collection of poetry, The Strange House Testifies, was published by Bilingual Review Press. Her second collection, Beasts Behave in Foreign Land, received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Press Prize. She is a Dodge Poet, a CantoMundo Fellow, and holds an MFA in poetry from NYU. She works as a high school English teacher in New Jersey.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPádraig Ó Tuama· Host0:00
[gentle music] My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and for a year I worked as a school chaplain. And during that year, three times, because I wrote it down each time so I remember it, three times young people spoke to me about an experience where they'd felt respected from one of their classmates or somebody at home or somebody in the school. And I don't know why. There was something about when an eleven-year-old or a twelve-year-old told me that they'd felt respected, that it really struck me because I wondered, what's the quality of encounter needed for a young person to feel and to know that they're respected? And none of these young people were speaking about a sense of entitlement that, you know, "I demand to be respected." There was, um, a deep sense of quietude in them that gave them pause to reflect on what they wanted as a result of being respected. I've never forgotten that, and it has changed my relationship with that word ever since. [clapping] "Carne" by Ruth Irupe Sanabria. I've eaten pork from pernil to chuletas to chitterlings. I've dipped my hands in oily paper bags of deep-fried gizzards and chicken hearts. I've swallowed raw clams and oysters.