"Los Gazquez has real magic, deep rhythms that reach back and forward in time. The turbine hums, a breeze moves wasps around a shrub, the sun goes into the canyon.
Or, the goat freaks out as a purple cloud, having covered the fire tower’s far-off light, arrives and starts dumping rain. Yordi pops a beer. The sun reappears and it changes.
And so on. Though I kept a steady routine during my stay, the days were radically different, moment to moment, one from the next. The book I wrote at Joya, I think, is a record of that.
In any case I am forever grateful to Donna and Simon for hosting me. What a wonderful privilege to have been."
James Capozzi is the author of Country Album (Parlor Press), which won the New Measure Poetry Prize, and Devious Sentiments (Finishing Line Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, and The Iowa Review, and he's been an artist in residence at Benaco Arte, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. He lives in New Jersey, where he edits the Journal of New Jersey Poets.