Yesika Salgado, also known as Yesika Starr, has the honor of being one of the few poets that can actually fuck me up with words. With the recent release of “Corazón,” her first book, I wanted to look back on other works from Salgado. “Sentimental Boss Bitch,” a chapbook, was self-published this year. It’s eighteen pages long. In those eighteen pages there’s love, joy, longing, pain, heartbreak and of course, learning how to be a sentimental boss bitch.
In a previous post, I mentioned how the body is one of the many recurring themes from Salgado, however, these poems are more about the interaction between body and feeling. She explores why we do certain things with our bodies because of our emotions and how the perception of the body is dependent on someone’s worldview. In her poem “Fat and Sexy,” Salgado challenges the notion that you can’t be both. “Like beautiful and cellulite / can’t kiss thighs” is one of my favorite stanzas from the poem because it subverts the stereotypical idea of beauty – the impossible standard that makes almost every girl feel like shit at one point in their lives. Yesika Salgado basically tells those ideas to fuck off with her poetry.
Overall, “Sentimental Boss Bitch” fills a tiny space with an abundance of prose and feelings. You could flip through the book with your eyes closed and pick a random line and no matter what it says, that line would always mean be beautiful. If you ever get a chance to read any of Yesika Salgado’s chapbooks, I would highly recommend checking this one out first. You may emerge from it as a sentimental boss bitch yourself. If anything, you can leave with one of the lines from the chapbook that I look at constantly, a self-love reminder.
“I look at myself one last time. Artwork.”
Watch our YouTube interview with Yesika below:
Part 1
Part 2
Find Yesika:
Instagram and Twitter: @yesikastarr
Site
Kelly Duarte is a Guatemalan-American writer and artist that’s really into pop culture (probably too much).
Learn more about her here.
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