Monica Rico is CantoMundo Fellow and Macondista who grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. She is an MFA graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, winner of a Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award, a 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry finalist, and 2021 winner of the Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Kaveh Akbar. Monica is Program Manager & Editor-in-Chief for the Bear River Writers’ Conference. Monica’s first book, Pinion, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.

The Annotated Nightstand: What Diane Seuss is Reading Now and Next

Featuring Frank O'Hara, Evie Shockley, Monica Rico, and More

Pinion reading and book signing in Saginaw!

Hoyt Library Auditorium

505 Janes Ave.
Monday, April 1, 2024
6:30pm - 7:30pm

“The lines bring to mind the kind of working-class attention that Philip Levine brought to his poems about Detroit, but with a different attention to synthesis. Here, everything that feels so physical, present, and muscular in the syntax also makes us see the weariness of something constructed to be shipped or driven somewhere else. The migrations of birds (for survival) and of people (for work) intersect, guiding the reader toward greater empathy.”

— Steven Leyva on Pinion, Washington Independent Review of Books

All the Shiny Knifes, a Poetry Off the Shelf discussion on cooking, grunt work, and the heat at General Motors — Monica Rico and Helena de Groot.

Major Jackson reads “Ferment” on The Slowdown, episode 1078.

Pinion - front cover
Pinion - Signed by the author
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Winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry

Inside Monica Rico’s Pinion, centuries grind together inside a pinch of yeast, across slain soldiers and a pigeon dusted with coal. It’s such a dazzling braid, illuminating (and complicating) civic histories with familial mythologies, then vice versa. Rico’s prodigious gift for form includes knowing when to rupture it, like a virtuoso punctuating a masterpiece by smashing apart her instrument onstage: “Mi’jo, mi’ja, // mi vida, petunia. / I’m trespassing once // I stop moving.” Pinion introduces us to a major new lyric voice—Rico absolutely soars.

—Kaveh Akbar, judge

Pinion

Pinion: The wing. To restrain by binding the arms. A gear. Within a single word—the title of this opulent collection—the inferences are packed like feathers around bone… Like Rivera’s murals and Kahlo’s paintings, Rico’s poems exist in both allegory and the real. Her crows, owls, robins, and cardinals are real birds charged with the electricity of symbolism.

— Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

Monica Rico is the poet we need now, and this book will be savored by all who read it—at this moment, and far into the future… This poet’s talent arrives to us seeming miraculous, effortless, and fully formed. A remarkable collection, this is poetry that is essential, powerful, and unforgettable.

— Laura Kasischke

“Evoking the splotches and stains on the sleeves of her chef whites, Rico’s poems are brilliantly tactile, giving new significance to elasticity as a means to stretch across the lines between home and professional cooking…”

— Daniel E. Bender and Signe Rousseau, for the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, Toronto and Cape Town, September 2021

Selected Publications

Awards, Fellowships, and Residencies