Iliana Rocha

Biography

Iliana Rocha’s work has been featured in Best New Poets 2014, as well as the Nation, RHINO, Blackbird, and West Branch. Karankawa (Pittsburgh, 2015), her debut collection, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Oklahoma.

See Work

POETRY / Spring 2018

Collective Memory

By Iliana Rocha

ten mexicans are dead, left to suffocate in a trailer, discovered after the driver asked someone for a drink of water.

POETRY / Spring 2018

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez I

By Iliana Rocha

When he traveled, he did so without mercy, in a body that was not a body but canvas painted with his handprints.

POETRY / Spring 2018

Texas Killing Fields

By Iliana Rocha

At the spot where the girl lay, I see the refineries. Their stencils are blurred on the horizon, making their machinery less intricate, & therefore, holy.

POETRY / Spring 2018

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez III

By Iliana Rocha

Walking into the smell of old wounds, something about my grandmother’s
bedroom always kept me from there—the perfume
once animal golden now rancid & dark as whiskey. Lace-
medallioned, doilies marking time turned to loss

POETRY / Spring 2018

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez II

By Iliana Rocha

Crooked red fingers of stretchmark on her hips, dough Isabel kneads back into hips, magnolias in her hair, blossoming hips