Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy, by Shandela Contreras

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy is a lyrical excavation of the Black & Brown body as both target and vessel. The hospital recurs here: sterile, haunted, and historically unkind, where marginalized women are expected to be silent. Threaded through these poems is an unflinching study of the cycle women inherit; how they are molded, whether consciously or by quiet modeling, to become saviors: to guard the future, to preserve the family through the preservation of themselves. Yet the very systems that demand this duty often deny the freedom or resources to fulfill it. Here, that tension breathes and breaks open.

Speaking through the voice of mother, grandmother, and the unnamed women whose stories stitch our shared history, the poet blurs the borders between personal and communal, embodying the truth that when one woman suffers, her echoes should reverberate through us all. The poet names herself a cricket: nocturnal, underestimated, mythically resilient. The voice here shifts restlessly: fragmented then fluid, incantatory then stripped bare, moving between whisper and wail, lullaby and lightning strike, always attuned to what cannot be said in daylight. In that shifting, the chapbook mirrors women’s survival itself: improvised, shapeshifting, defiant. This chapbook is an homage to women whose strength has been misunderstood as anger, whose softness was shrunk to erasure, but whose birthright has always been transformation.

Shandela Contreras is a Los Angeles-based poet, activist, and educator. She’s the author of Every Beautiful Pen Bleeds Through (2024) and Mellow Ballads, that move your bones (2021), and served as a California & Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador. Her work has been featured at events with the Grammy-winning LA Master Chorale at Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA Times Festival of Books, the 2022 Brotherhood Crusade Gala honoring Dodgers' Mookie Betts, and Lincoln Center’s Anthem to Us Project with legendary Lara Downes, among many others. Her poems have been featured in NPR’s Morning Edition and in a Taylor & Francis Co. publication. She was selected as one of eight poets to represent the City of Los Angeles in Paris for the 2024 Cultural Olympic Games. She is a firm believer that the voices of the past shape those of the future. You can find her on social media @shandelaa.