2022 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award
One Author – English

International Latino Book Awards

2022 Outstanding Book

International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry

2022 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Winner

Independent Book Publishers Association

2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award Winner

Chosen by ALLISON JOSEPH

 “A triumph, a gutting cry of love and longing for all that migration sows and uproots in the survivors of exile. In retracing her family’s story of leaving a Chile under Pinochet to 1980s Oklahoma, Soledad Caballero gives soaring voice to the ways history, memory, and the collective weight of our disappeared live silenced, but never unheard, in our bodies and hearts. It’s hard to express how much these poems made unnamed parts of me feel seen.” 

– NATALIA SYLVESTER, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home
and Chasing the Sun

“Caballero bears unflinching witness to the emotional trauma inherited from war-ravaged Chile to the exiled plains of Oklahoma. As though to witness is to love. These poems negotiate the transitions of language, memory, country, her battle with cancer, counterbalancing the violence from which she fled, with a transformative devotion to details.”

– RICHARD BLANCO, Presidential Inaugural Poet

“Caballero explores memory, war in Chile, and immigration to the U.S. in a deeply personal and touching way.”

– LATINO STORIES, “2021 Top 10 ‘New’ Latino Latinx Authors
You, Your Family, and Teachers Need To Read”

“[S]he’s asking the question of self, while she beholds the brilliance of these questions that hang in the air; these birds. Rilke used to do this sometimes; he’d speak about God and then immediately bring in the question of self. And Soledad Caballero is doing the same thing here — looking at these visual demonstrations of beauty and brutality and brilliance, and then recognizing the question of self, in relation to the watching. She’s watching the watcher, herself, as well as watching the watched.”

– PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA, On Being, Poetry Unbound , May 2022