STREAMING SERVICE: season two
STREAMING SERVICE: season two is the long-awaited sequel to Sofía Aguilar’s debut poetry chapbook, STREAMING SERVICE: golden shovels made for tv (2021). With a growing masterful hand, Aguilar returns to a familiar poetic form to weave together dialogue from more tv shows past and present (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Bridgerton, I Love Lucy) with her own personal experiences of break-ups, new love, kinship, family, and navigating multi-faceted identity while still processing the trauma of history. Roping in fellow contemporary poets for collaboratively-written golden shovels (“crossover episodes”) and lyrics from a few of her favorite artists to create song-inspired golden shovels (“season soundtrack”), she creates an ever-expansive, ambitious, and most of all, tender love letter to television itself—all while writing her own story.
praise for STREAMING SERVICE: season two
With STREAMING SERVICE: season two, Sofía continues her experiments in formal reinvention, combining the constraints of the golden shovel with prose poems, contrapuntals, and other poetic forms, all while maintaining the semblance of ease through her lyrical style. The warmth evident in her previous collection has been stoked into a fire – these poems are both tender and striking, exploring womanhood, love and its aftermath, family dynamics, and moments of cultural longing and belonging. Sofía expands the intertextual spirit of the golden shovel by collaborating with special guest stars and by drawing formal and thematic inspiration from the works of poetic influences, populating her chapbook with the presence of peers and idols alike. This brilliant second installment builds on the rich world created by the first – every phrase that Sofía borrows is reframed, woven into her own words, and left to resonate with new life.
- Devi Sastry, poet, writer, and editor
Sofía Aguilar has done it again with STREAMING SERVICE: season two! This brilliant collection of poetry explores themes of family, love, friendship, culture, sexuality, identity, classism, and racism with unflinching vulnerability. There are even more exciting structures to read and interpret in different ways. Each detail dances off the page, and the storm of emotions you feel while reading goes down like tequila (reference intended)--it burns in all the right places and makes you feel something when you don't know how. Sofía is a voice to watch.
- Rebecca Williamson, writer and editor
Sofía Aguilar's STREAMING SERVICE: season two is fierce. Aguilar makes us think of her Chicana ancestry & lineage(s) with the use of spanish & english poetics as she crafts what love & family & grief & joy & rage mean to them. Entering the world with callbacks from "STREAMING SERVICE: season one", there are surprises, epiphanies, & stories at each line break & golden shovel allowing for Aguilar's creativity & writing to flourish that flows so well from one poem to the next. After experiencing the geography of Aguilar's world built within "season two", I am eagerly anticipating a third season.
- Ori Fong, poet and writer
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