I Have Learned to Define a Field as a Space Between Mountains

by Rio Cortez

"I have learned to define a field as a space between mountains" by Rio Cortez is the winner of the inaugural Toi Derricotte + Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Created through a partnership between Cave Canem, The Writer's Room at the Betsy Hotel, and O, Miami Poetry Festival, the prize honors one chapbook manuscript a year by a black poet, regardless of the poet's publication history or career status.

Genres: Poetry

35 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Rio Cortez is the New York Times bestselling author of picture books The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020) and The River Is My Sea (S&S, 2024). Her debut poetry collection, Golden Ax, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets this August, 2022.

Reviews

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was told to read “Self-Portrait in a Tanning Bed” a few years ago and I’ve been waiting for Rio Cortez’s book ever since. I have learned to define a field as a space between mountains is a clashing of history, the body, and memory. In poems like "I'm Forced to Imagine There Are Two of Me Here" and "Visiting Whitney Plantation," Cortez shows the complexity, the hurt, of living genealogy.

"We are in Wallace, Louisiana
looking for our people's names
now upon a marble wall of 70,000
first names in no particular order
I sidestep a white man with a camera
so that I can take my mother's
hand from her mouth and hold it" (35)

As Ross Gay writes in the intro, poetry exists to create something “new and heartbreakingly possible.” I can't say I feel the same because my history is different, but Cortez articulates the ache of reality, in a way that makes you think: if we can communicate how history has made us, there may be space to move forward.

"Beauty always strikes me when I consider its going & am hurt by it
how now light enters through the curtains at dusk & find it beautiful
because it is about to change" (31)

This book is beautiful in so many ways.

[Bettina Judd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection that considers the shoaling of indigenous and black space, the contours of gendered and racial embodiment, and our human mirroring to the landscape.

[Arie Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s absolutely beautiful. You must have this on your shelf.