King Yesenia, by Henrick Karoliszyn

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

King Yesenia is a surreal desert elegy following an undocumented woman who renames herself after the death of her brother. Set against the haunted landscapes of the American Southwest, the work explores grief, migration, identity, addiction, and survival through fragmented visions and mythic prose-poetry. The title itself becomes an act of reclamation. “King” is not masculinity but sovereignty, a refusal to disappear in a country that has reduced her existence to legal status, labor, and fear. The desert acts as a spiritual borderland populated by peyote visions, junkyard prophets, narcotic cowboys, and ghosts who speak through its climate, memory, and machinery. At its core, King Yesenia is a meditation on self-invention and spiritual endurance in a hostile world.

The work asks what remains when boundaries, institutions, and even language fail to contain human experience. Through lyrical fragments, prophetic imagery, and emotionally raw confession, the chapbook constructs a mythology of the dispossessed. One where undocumented migrants, addicts, mourners, and queer outcasts become figures of tragic royalty. By the end, Yesenia emerges not healed but transformed, transporting her grief like wisdom, honoring the dead by continuing to fight for the living.

Henrick Karoliszyn is a writer based in New Orleans. His fiction was published in the 2025 Hemingway Shorts literary anthology, shortlisted twice for The Letter Review Prize, named winner of the 2025 Breakwater Review fiction contest, and a finalist for the 2026 Ellis Prize in Fiction and 2026 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize. His writing has also been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Superlative Literary Journal, The Swannanoa Review, FOLIO Literary Journal, and BULL along with forthcoming editions of the New Ohio Review, The Write Launch, and The Threepenny Review.