CPL Board member Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs is the editor of a new bilingual poetry anthology, Somos Ajolotes or We’re All Axolotles. That all living things are endangered species at this time feels accurate. To have my own work published with many fine Latinx poets is a thrill.

The Seattle launch of Somos Ajolotes will be Monday, May 18 at 12N at Casey Commons on the campus of Seattle University. 

It has not been an easy time in T 2.0 for members of the Latinx community, so an anthology like this one, combined with launch events in Seattle and elsewhere, is a rare opportunity for poets to gather, share work linked to our current crisis and make a record of just what is happening now. MAGAs days are numbered, as are all fascist movements and it is at gatherings like this launch and with books like Somos Ajolotes that we display the grit that got us here and allows us to thrive despite the challenges posed by those who have no vision and only violence to back up their prejudices. As Gabriella says in her own poem “Distrust”:

We are not the colonial
ancestors of hate.
We have walked on coals,
ridden the train of deaths,
the rails, pulled by mules,
into cenotes of creativity…

Americans say we are,
our hands tied by consumerism and debt:
we know our ancestors did not possess it…

That Greg Bem’s Carbonation Press is publishing this book is also a blessing, as he has been a good friend of the Cascadia Poetics Lab since the old Splab days in Columbia City. Buy a book: https://www.carbonationpress.com/anthology-catalog/axolotls and see you May 18, 2026 at Seattle U.