STREAMING SERVICE: the series finale
STREAMING SERVICE: the series finale is the third and final installment of Sofía Aguilar’s STREAMING SERVICE trilogy. Four years after the publication of season two, Aguilar returns to the golden shovel poetry form with new urgency and fire, plucking lines of dialogue from TV shows old, contemporary, and brand-new (Mad Men, The White Lotus, Only Murders in the Building) to explore her meditations on home, family, myth-making, truth-telling, grief, mental illness, and our relationship to land and body.
With each new poem, she bends and twists the golden shovel into a shape of her own making, turning constraints into new freedoms. Featuring collaboratively-written golden shovels (“crossover episodes”), golden shovels inspired by song lyrics (“season soundtrack”), and poems using dialogue exclusively from other series finales (“the end”), she says good-bye to a form that has transformed her work for the better and finishes out the series on a striking note that lasts long after the last page—all while knowing that good things never truly come to a close.
praise for STREAMING SERVICE: the series finale
Sofía's STREAMING SERVICE: the series finale is a gorgeous collection that is groundbreaking. It takes the reader through a careful series of poems that show how one can be soft and powerful yet alluring at the same time. The poems within this collection captivate a reader with their formatting, from simply turning the physical book to solving crosswords. It's poetically-lyrically brilliant in how Sofía can engage someone with their words. When you enter the series, you feel heartache, familiarity, and overall vulnerability to connect with. Simply a beautiful way to end this compilation of work.
— Celeste Alyssa Gomez, author of Besos, Diosa, and Founder of La Poeta Publicationsr
In STREAMING SERVICE: the series finale, Sofía Aguilar once again performs the alchemical feat of spinning television dialogue, poems, lyrics into golden shovels that shimmer with hard-won truth, woven into Aguilar's and those of her guest stars own urgent interrogations of belonging and becoming. These poems ask: what does it mean to find home in a body that refuses easy categorization, in a country that draws borders through your bloodline, in a life that feels both scripted and improvised, when identity is both performance and bone-deep knowing? Aguilar transforms the disposable into the indelible, turning the language of binge-watched media into meditations on vulnerability and the self we construct scene by scene. The collection's formal innovations mirror the fragmented, multilingual consciousness of a speaker navigating language loss and generational silence, reaching toward a grandmother's Spanish across an unbridgeable distance, mapping desire across California's burning landscapes—wetlands and freeways, wildfire and therapy sessions. This is a series finale that understands endings are never clean, but they're the moment when everything you've been performing finally cracks open to reveal what was real all along. Aguilar profoundly writes toward a truth that can only be found by watching yourself closely, then bravely looking away.
— Shandela Contreras, award-winning spoken-word poet & author of Every Beautiful Pen Bleeds Through
Sofía Aguilar returns with the third—and, sadly, final—installment of her STREAMING SERVICE series. Like any unforgettable series finale, fans celebrate one more round of episodes even as they brace for the end of Aguilar’s remarkable contribution to the legacy of the golden shovel. And what a way to bring it all home. Aguilar wields the form with unmatched force, tunneling deeper into home, family, myth-making, truth-telling, grief, mental illness, and our relationship to land and body. Her craft is innovative, brave, playful, and consistently inspiring. In “my gender is an unsolvable crossword,” Aguilar reshapes the form entirely, challenging the reader to confront what can and cannot be solved—especially when it comes to the boundaries of gender. Threads of Aguilar’s amor appear throughout, surfacing in moments of tenderness between the speaker and their beloved. Her writing fuses raw talent with intentional precision, blending modern pop culture through borrowed dialogue, lyrics, titles, and lines in ways that feel both fresh and deeply considered. STREAMING SERVICE: the series finale reminds us that the golden shovel belongs to all of us, inviting other voices to appear within the work. This diversity of perspective and style only highlights Aguilar’s transformative approach to both poetry and media. From the opening poem to the final page, Aguilar refuses to shy away from vulnerability and embraces change—sometimes literally—asking the reader to tilt the book or read in circles, as in “i want to be stuck in a time loop with you.” For readers new to the golden shovel, the STREAMING SERVICE series deserves a place in its study, offering a masterful example of what the form has been and what it can continue to become.
— Alexis Jaimes, author of Corazón Coalesced
As only Sofía Aguilar can, with visually rich storytelling that draws you in easy and tender at first line, her poetry in their final installment of STREAMING SERVICE is sincere as ever, both in language and style, revealing a portrait of a person––blemished and beautiful––reveling, or reflecting in the moments of everyday that create a flashing portal towards self-discovery. There's something innately wholesome, yet sharp and piercing, sin pelos en la lengua, about their work in STREAMING: SERVICE: the series finale. It's a place to suspend, be held softly by her rhythm and prose––romantic, but searingly honest––and find pieces of yourself along the way.
— Andrea Aliseda, author of argentum et aurum and Plant Based! Mexican
Sofia Aguilar’s greatest gift as a poet is the ability to make all her poems feel like personal experiences for the readers, even if we have never known the world as she has. Her craft is beautifully honored by its framing device (an ode to TV), which allows her writing to flow like a river, connecting us to her kaleidoscopic understanding of Los Angeles and what it means to grow up and rediscover one's identity. It’s a deeply modern collection that feels magnificently timeless. Familiar and extraordinary.
— Noelle Cope, Screenwriter and author of Notes From The In-Between