Flight Plan

AUTHOR OF AWARD-WINNING I WAS A BELL and FINALIST for the 2025 Julie Suk Award

M. Soledad Caballero explores the complexities of the body, delving into themes such as cancer, memory, and love in a lyrical collection of poems you won’t want to miss.

“This stunning book is an elegy for the body before, an ode for the body after.”–Carmen Giménez, author of Be Recorder

“Masterfully uses visceral language and vivid imagery to hold space for both sorrow and hope, beauty and pain, the light and the dark, the water and the land.”–Jasminne Mendez, author of City Without Altar

In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation.

Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.

M. Soledad Caballero, professor of English and co-chair of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Allegheny College, is a Macondo and CantoMundo fellow. Her collection I Was a Bell (Red Hen Press, 2021) won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. I Was a Bell was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year and a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. She is an avid TV watcher and a terrible birder. She splits her time between Pittsburgh and Meadville, Pennsylvania.