Isaac Salazar
2025 Michelle Boisseau Prize Winner
—
Stationary Horse
Like any domestic animal, I was once a playful thing.
Nudge of the blue ball Owner gifts me which,
to my mind, is the world. And to feel too big for it
is confusing sometimes. Sitting on the wooden fence is a jury
of crows. Dung piles, like years of neglect disguised as land mines
I must not retrieve. Owner offers their hand the way a tree bears fruit.
Another sky pasted on the sky that is, now, called yesterday.
A photograph, every summer, with a yellow domestic rocket
ship of schoolchildren, never enlists its silences. Behind my canvas back is always
the knife of my grandfather’s, father’s, brother’s, mother’s hand. I am fed
hay & seeds. Sugar cubes mined from the moon. My mouth is a pound
of meat & unsaid language. I try to peer on the inside of myself
& find a world of ghosts dressed up as organs. Who says a body holds
violence inherently? At once I am beast, but also animal. We must recognize
the difference. I like the word guardian when I’m wearing it like armor.
—
Reaching Beyond the Singularity of My Own Voice:
Isaac Salazar on Persona Poems in Conversation with Editor Marcus Myers
Our contest judge and beloved contributor Jenny Molberg selected Isaac Salazar’s anonymous poem “Stationary Horse” as the winning poem in the 2025 Michelle Boisseau Prize. Molberg also selected his piece “Rainbow” as a finalist poem, and we’ve published it in Bear Review Issue 12, Volume 2 as well. Molberg had this to say about “Stationary Horse”:
“This poet embodies what Rita Dove once said, that “poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” “Stationary Horse,” an unforgettable persona poem, beckons us into the borrowed consciousness of a toy, one that suggests real, difficult implications about ownership, violence, and protection. “Who says a body holds violence inherently?” the poet writes: through the domesticated world of the stationary horse, we consider the secret memories of the things we keep, and what it means to say that we “own” items, others, even ourselves. I returned to this poem again and again. I will continue to revisit its brilliant, fraught world, marvelling at this poet’s innovative world-building, luminous imagery, and the charged silence of ‘unsaid language’.”
Marcus Myers: Let's start with the process and revision of your winning poem “Stationary Horse.” What went into the composition of this poem? And how did these steps differ from other poems you've written?
Isaac Salazar: “Stationary Horse” has become one of several persona poems that emerged out of my growing willingness to write more confrontationally about my family. For me, writing about family has meant reckoning with what I’ve inherited, what I’ve challenged and reclaimed, as well as what I’ve chosen to set aside for so long. That process hasn’t been easy, I don’t think it ever will be, especially when it requires revisiting emotions I’ve deliberately put away in order to fully inhabit and enjoy the life I’ve built for myself and is, now, a thing I can say I have absolute control over.
Where this poem aligns with my other work is in its reliance on imagery to carry emotional weight. I wrote “Stationary Horse” during a period when I was thinking seriously about the communication I’ve withheld from my mother since high school, as well as the ambivalence I feel when confronting my father about the traumas tied to his side of the family. In many ways, both sides converge around questions of accountability.
What makes this poem feel distinct in my body of work is how quickly it came together. Typically, my poems emerge fragmented; as in, lines or phrases are collected over time in a notebook or a running Google document. But more recently, I’ve found myself composing poems in fuller drafts, often sparked by images or phrases that surface almost spontaneously. These moments feel “magical,” though I suspect they are simply drawn from the experiences of everyday life. In the case of “Stationary Horse,” the image of the horse arrived unexpectedly. I hadn’t seen a horse at the time, but I was reminded of a childhood memory at my cousin’s ranch in Central Texas, where I touched a horse for the first time. I remember the smoothness of its hair, and the sense that I was in the presence of a deeply pensive animal.
MM: “Stationary Horse” is such a fitting title for everything you’ve just described. In this reader’s mind, a stationary horse represents a controlled strength and discipline, a sense of stability and calm while looking back at your pensive former self.
Something about what you say about how this piece emerged, almost fully formed, from your reflecting on your past begs my next question: What is the function of your poems?
IS: Yes! And I would say the controlled strength became not only an outcome but a method that guided the writing of my poem. I tend to write autobiographically, returning to the “I” as a way of attending to the present moment, to what I noticed today, to what still lingers from last week, to what my body continues to carry even after the moment has passed. My poems often begin in that space of immediacy where attention and residue meet. With “Stationary Horse” and my recent persona poems, however, I find myself reaching beyond the singularity of my own voice. I am much less interested in the etymological meaning or the psychological, Jungian understanding of persona as a mask that mediates between an inner self and the expectations of the world. I am far more interested in the ways persona can generate kinship, or a deeper and more situated connection between the poet, their subjects, and the audience who enters that exchange. Persona does not conceal so much for me as it relates and opens a space where my poetic voice becomes shared and where distance becomes a condition for intimacy rather than its failure.
I do not experience this turn to the persona in “Stationary Horse” as a removal of my own face, but as a borrowing that emerges through emotional proximity. Such a felt connection I think allows me to speak from within another position without abandoning my own. In inhabiting the horse, especially a horse rendered immobile, I am not suggesting an absence of strength within myself, but acknowledging that there are moments when strength becomes inaccessible, when it must be approached indirectly, through another body, another voice, another way of seeing. The persona becomes a means of return and a way of recovering what feels distant, which is why these poems, though spoken through others, remain undeniably personal. Persona poems are personal poems for me. At the time of writing, persona felt necessary; it was not simply a stylistic choice I was playing around with but, rather, an instrument, a weapon, that could carry me toward what I could not confront alone. In retrospect, I could not have written this poem through my own voice in isolation. The poem required a companion's presence who could move with me into the difficulty and, when needed, stand within it alongside me.
As I reflect now, I understand the function of my poetry at the moment as a method for accessing strength through catharsis, while also serving as an archive of that strength as it accumulates over time. My poems resemble letters addressed to moments I have lived through, each one marking where I have felt something intensely or endured something difficult. They do not suggest that I have moved beyond those experiences entirely, but instead offer evidence that I have encountered them before, that I have survived them, and that I may encounter them again with a deeper, more grounded sense of strength.
MM: This reminds me of Keats' notion of negative capability, wherein the poet develops the capacity to exist in "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Your version eschews the annihilation or melting away of oneself, it seems, as Keats prescribed a poet do to “fill other bodies” with poetic voice. Do you think Keats goes too far in the direction of self-effacement? It seems you're able to retain important textures and densities of yourself while inhabiting your personae. But maybe Keats was essentially making the same or similar moves as you?
IS: I’m barely encountering this term now, but certainly “negative capability” sounds applicable to my work and I would say that, after doing a small rabbit hole dive on it, I do find myself aligned with Keats in certain ways. Poetry, at its best, makes room for what we don’t fully understand, and it can and should hold uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. That openness feels essential to me, especially as someone who is drawn to contradiction and expressions of doubt in poetry. Doubt is a feeling of the century, and probably my feeling of the year.
I think here, too, of Wisława Szymborska and her 1996 Nobel lecture, where she insists that poets must keep saying “I don’t know.” That line of hers has always really stayed with me, because there very much is a kind of ethical humility in your willingness not to oversaturate experience with interpretation too quickly. Uncertainty is certainly an axis of mine that I have explored and, actually, am still exploring as of lately in my writing. I've been writing observationally about Houston, trying to imagine what it might mean to become a Gulf Coast poet. I’ve even been fumbling through Spanish or moments of linguistic slippage and misrecognition which have been generative precisely because they resist comprehension over anything.
But I also want to push back a bit on Keats, or at least on how negative capability sometimes gets taken up as an ideal. Personally, I don’t think uncertainty should be treated as an absolute poetic virtue. There are moments where the call to remain in doubt can feel less like openness and more like a kind of quietism, which is what I've intended for "Stationary Horse" to resist. Like, why must we make uncertain what is already, materially or historically, certain? For me, the idea of fully melting away the self to inhabit an elsewhere feels like it risks erasing the very textures that give a poem its emotional force. Like I said, I don’t want to disappear entirely into my personas. I want to carry my histories, my attachments, and my positionality into those voices not as a limitation but as a condition of my honesty.
And more than that, there are situations where, to my mind, dwelling in ambiguity can actually reproduce harm. If a space is already structured by violence (whether personal, historical, environmental, etc.) then choosing to sit with uncertainty about it can feel inadequate and perhaps even complicit. In those cases, I’m less interested in sustaining doubt and more interested in writing from a place of experiential certainty. Not certainty as in absolute knowledge because, at the end of the day I'm sharing only my side of a multi-faceted story, but certainty as in: I know what this felt like in my body and I know what this did to me or to others.
So I don’t think Keats is entirely wrong and I actually think we're making similar moves. But where he leans toward self-effacement as a kind of poetic ideal, I find myself wanting more of a balance. I want permeability, yes, but not disappearance. I want openness, but not at the expense of clarity where clarity matters. Negative capability becomes less of a rule and more of an occasionally useful tool in that it is something I enter and exit depending on what the poem, and the world it’s engaging, actually wants and demands.
MM: You know, until now, in the context of our conversation about persona poems, I hadn’t thought of how this scheme of leaning into uncertainty, of unknowingness, can itself become a set of blinders, especially when deployed by white, or in-other-ways privileged, poets. This brings to mind color blindness, which of course is a form of racism. And reflecting on this has sparked a memory of an incredibly astute essay on writing whiteness I read a while back by Joy Katz, a poet whose work we’ve featured in Bear Review, who identifies this perpetuation of all-white spaces and all-white voices, via erasure by way of color blindness, as one of the ways in which white poetry has done harm. Katz writes, “We can’t dial back whiteness or revise it out of our poems. But we can shift whiteness to awareness and go from there,” and, “ If whiteness is not a thing, but a force, it is still made of stuff. The stuff of whiteness is blindness and willful denial.” As a person of color, how often do you read poems by white poets who seem unaware of their own whiteness and the ways in which a poem might unwittingly be a vehicle for perpetuating it?
IS: I don’t know that I can quantify how often I encounter that kind of unawareness in white poets, but I can say that I assume the feeling of it pretty quickly. Maybe intuitively. I’m sure there are more well-established poets who could provide a better cheat sheet to this but, seeing this unawareness on the page for poems that are actively thinking about race comes as, for lack of a better word, a plainness on the surface that doesn’t have to account for itself. Most of the time that plainness comes from a poet who is trying to name a social ill, but it becomes a thing of the past (and, therefore, becomes a nonfactor or supposedly already overcome), or when the poet simply says a social ill exists sometime or somewhere now and then, yet they ultimately leave it for the deconstruction and interpretation of the reader when, assumedly, it should be the white poet’s job to confront it, whether on or off the page but especially off the page. Poems are lived extensions of thought, and I think that’s what Joy Katz is getting at with whiteness not just an identity but as a set of permissions, including the permission not to see and be (color) blind.
I would like to think poetry is one of the few spaces where the insulation of privilege can actually be exploded. The act of writing, of being in language and being with language, can and should force confrontation with how thought takes shape. And if things like racism, colorism, and homophobia, among many others, are learned, internalized things, then they will inevitably surface in that process. The question then becomes is the poet willing to stay with that discomfort long enough to recognize it or not? That’s why I think of poetry as a potentially decolonial practice, but only under certain conditions. I’ll be careful in saying that, because I don’t mean “decolonial practice” metaphorically but, rather, materially and personally. If you want to think of poetry as a decolonial process, then it requires a genuine attentiveness to what your language is doing. How does it position your speaker and its content? How does it imagine others? How does it move through the world and toward a reader? That kind of attentiveness can’t be faked nor rushed.
In my own work, like in “Stationary Horse,” I’m writing through the trauma of homophobia and intergenerational SA, but whiteness is also part of the landscape I’m navigating. And I’ll be honest by saying that I’ve struggled with the label “person of color” for myself. I have a white mother and a Mexican American father, and for a long time I felt like I couldn’t fully claim either side. More often than not, people chose for me. They read me as white, or as a white Latino, sometimes a Latino with some color, and I went along with all that, partly out of pressure to conform, partly out of fear to not choose nonconformity, and partly because I recognized that there were forms of privilege being extended to me, even if I didn’t fully understand them at the time. So when I read poems by white poets who seem unaware of their own whiteness, I don’t just read them from a distance but put them alongside my own history of being read, which complicates things. It makes the question less about pointing outward and more about asking what does it mean to come into awareness, and what do we do once we’re there? I think Katz is right that whiteness can’t be revised out, but I do think poetry can be a space where that “stuff” she names like blindness and denial can become visible and, therefore, contestable. The risk for white poets is mistaking not knowing for innocence rather than recognizing it as something that needs to be worked through.
MM: Wonderful response, Isaac. Thanks so much for speaking with me and illuminating so much for our readers and myself. Before I go, here’s one final question: what books (of poetry or other genres) would you recommend that might enrich our understanding of your poetics?
IS: I have so many book recommendations! I’m actually completing an independent study on Creative Writing Pedagogy and a lot of the texts I read for that have been very formative in my understanding of poetry as it gets taught within and outside of institutional spaces.
I recommend The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez, Beyond Craft: an Anti-Handbook for Creative Writers by Steve Westbrook and James Ryan, Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology by Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, The Art of Voice by Tony Hoagland, Poets Teaching Poets by Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt, Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder, Teaching Creative Writing by Stephanie Vanderslice, and The Scholarship of Creative Writing Practice by Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings.
Just to reiterate: these are pedagogical books on creative writing. If I were to recommend poetry collections, I’d recommend what you, as a poet or writer, have been avoiding or what you’ve kept on the back burner. Often, the work we’re hesitant to approach ends up being the most beneficial reads of our lifetimes.
Thank you so much for this conversation, Marcus! And thank you to the Bear Review team and Jenny Molberg for selecting me as the winner. It means a lot, truly.
Isaac Salazar is an Austin-born and Houston-based poet. His poems have been published or forthcoming in Asterales, AGNI, Hayden's Ferry, Honey Literary, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. He is a graduate student at Rice University.
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