Nicole Arocho Hernández (‘15) recently published an e-chapbook of poems, I Have No Ocean, with Sundress Publications. The poems are set in post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico and highlight the devastation and displacement the speaker and their family and neighbors feel. Sundress described the poems in the book as “prayers for the unmoored,” and said that the longing Arocho Hernández portrays through her work is palpable.
In her review of the book, poet Raina J. León praised Arocho Hernández for exploring Puerto Rico’s complicated history and “[daring] to fear and be fearsome, divining the definition of feral as wildness especially after escaping from captivity.” Poet Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, who met Arocho Hernández online just two years after Hurricane María, also commended her, and said “she has made a brutal song for that meta diaspora we tended to after an unending string of mediated catastrophes and the archipelago.”
Arocho Hernández has published poems in Great Weather for Media, Variant Literature, and The Acentos Review. Her poems have also been featured in the VS podcast. She currently works as a translator and is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Arizona State University.
Read more about I Have No Ocean here.