Death Is a Mariachi

Winner of the 2024 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize

Marcy Rae Henry’s speaker roams from New Orleans to New Delhi in death is a mariachi, a raw yet nuanced exploration of the shifting nature of identity, spirituality, and place. Reckoning with death through the lens of Buddhist ideology, the speaker technicolors her world: a blue-green whiptail lizard reproduces through parthenogenesis, golden oil glistens in petrichor, even the morphine in a grandmother’s IV takes on a kaleidoscopic sheen. Henry engages texts from 1970’s electronica to molcajetes and tejolotes this intersectional, eco-feminist exploration of the body and the soul, their limits, and their excesses. In her formally inventive and full-throated debut, Henry sings of the liminal, of the “soul separating from skin,” of words that are “useful as bones.” The speaker names what she sees and lets it go. She never tells anyone that she’s time travelling.

Marcy Rae Henry is an associate editor for RHINO Poetry and an associate professor of English, Literature and Creative Writing at Wilbur Wright College, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American and Latine Studies Program and was awarded Phi Theta Kappa HonorSociety’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award. She lives in Chicago.