Murmuration Archives

Arkilica Series
Noemi Press
August 18, 2026

“Felicia Zamora’s brilliant book-length collection, Murmuration Archives, combines archival research of an ancient Codex with personal testimony of breast cancer to enact a wondrous and howling narrative of healing, existence, and survival. Spoken from the voice of a poet whose body has endured and traveled far to pay ancestral respects, this book is relentless and searing as much as it is tender and vulnerable. Zamora achieves language that is both meticulous and exquisite alongside impactful visuals that revere the image as its own kind of text. In what becomes a fiery meditation for our fractured times and a salve for the wounds of past, present, and future, Zamora’s poems reach enthralling heights while honoring the revelations of the Codex as document and origin for the cellular and spiritual self.”

Mai Der Vang, author of Primordial

To inhabit this archive is to be in Zamora’s “tricky god mess” of space and time…

“Amid stricken lines gray as ashes, a poem concludes: “Something lovely murmurs in the unknowing.” This is Felicia Zamora reckoning with cancer and chemo, those feuding, brutal conquerors. Isolated to the poem, the line reads as a revelation. But. Pages before, there’s Zamora’s staggering “Plaything,” in which the poet—furious, disconsolate—lays bare colonial power’s senseless vandalization of the Nahua’s sacred Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl leaving Zamora’s heritage rent, burnt, unknown. In Murmuration Archives’ implacable chorus, revelation must also be prayer; regeneration, death; a routine physical, a summoning ritual to Huixtocihuatl, whose saltwater surges into a different poem pages and pages later. To inhabit this archive is to be in Zamora’s “tricky god mess” of space and time, “after of Spanish left [Zamora’s] body hollow,” “before Diagnosis,” all “while watching documentaries about ancient Maya civilizations.” Here? Then must also be now, just as what’s murmured must be lovely, must be horrid.”

Douglas Kearney, author of I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always

“Felicia Zamora writes about the female body with exacting precision. In Murmuration Archives, wounds are mapped across millenia, traveling past, present and future in ways I never fathomed. Through these dynamic poems I, too, understand that fragmentation is a gift and that desire itself is holy. This is an expansive and necessary collection.”

Erika L. Sánchez, author of Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir

Interstitial Archaeology

Wisconsin Poetry Series
University of Wisconsin Press
April 2025

“Offers powerful and disquieting vignettes exploring racism, language, and the body. . . . Anatomical and ecological metaphors, bleak sociopolitical realities, and confessional reverie are bolstered through strategic use of white space, erasure, and repetition. Palpable and urgent, these potent poems revel in defiance, catharsis, and wonder.”

Publishers Weekly

“[A] forceful new collection. . . . The work of a master deploying all of her tools. . . . Readers who delight in hard questions and the spaciousness of ideas and have a sense of social responsibility will find these poems urgent and rousing.”

Booklist

This book is impossibly good.

“Interstitial Archaeology is all-consuming. It’s a marvel. Sometimes, a poetry collection feels like inhabiting the vast and intricate estate of a person’s imagination, as if entering a cathedral, where the saints, captured in stained glass, are the chalk-outlined martyrs haunting our newsfeeds. Felicia Zamora incorporates all knowledge: math, myth, and memory, from Emerson to Audre Lorde. The poetic forms included here are like a collection of fragments from a lost city. This book is impossibly good. These poems are both grounded and otherworldly. Prepare yourself. Eat a big breakfast and pack a lunch. This book is a journey.”

Amaud Jamaul Johnson, author of Imperial Liquor

“Entering the wholly original lexicon of Felicia Zamora’s poems is migrating into a body made of raw wonder and grit. She is a fiercely courageous poet, alchemizing words into new meanings, constellating ecologies with the violences of her childhood, & writing with all her force against the cruel wars of hegemony. This book is a gift—a call to speak truth, to keep excavating our own humanity, ‘knees in loose soil, knuckles in earth.’”

Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia

Quotient

Tinderbox Editions
March 2022

"Quotient is a celebration of codes that make up our world: DNA, language, geometry, Fibonacci, song, rhizomes, the “lovely legerdemain” and arithmetic of the body. Do you remember /in radiolarian, the images / etched in microscopic minerals? / Once you were a butterfly, Zamora muses; reminding us of the beauty in pattern, how each coil builds upon the next, how each mathematical sequence of our existence is a kind of quotidian magic; her poems act as microscopes fitted to the eye of the reader. A book of revelations, Quotient looks past death, destruction, grief—focuses instead on the miraculous echo of tree rings, “& loss / is loss no more”—with an intensity and tenderness that catch like a sob of joy in the throat.”

Deborah A. Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir and Altar for Broken Things

I Always Carry My Bones

University of Iowa Press
April 15, 2021

“How do we speak out of the dust inside we will become?’ Zamora asks, and the answer is bit by bit, poem by stunning poem. Through personal histories (hers and ours), coyotes, and language at times lush as moons and at times sober and simple as daylight, Felicia Zamora—one of my favorite poets—drags America to the desert and takes America to task, survives it, destroys it, renames it, and it’s a blessing for our own weary brown to bask in what she’s done and learned with the carrying of her own.”

Danez Smith, National Book Award Finalist