mg roberts

Born in Subic Bay, Philippines, Mg Roberts teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Kelsey Street Press member, VONA/Voices Alum, and sits on the Board of Small Press Traffic. She is author of not so, sea (Durga Press, 2014) and her work has appeared in the Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Dusie, Bombay Gin, Web Conjunctions, GALATEA RESURRECTS, Elderly and elsewhere. She co-edited the anthology Nests and Strangers: On Asian Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press) along with Timothy Yu and is currently co-editing Responses, New Writing, Flesh with Ronaldo Wilson and Bhanu Kapil; an anthology on the urgency of avant-garde writing written for a
nd by writers of color. She lives in Oakland with her three daughters, two hens, one puppy, and geologist husband. Roberts’ Black Radish title Anemal, Uter Meck was published in February 2017.

you forget you were someone/something

else. you forget your beak. your.


your tract skin and map of blurred lines.

you forget you’re constantly birthing a placenta, a stitched territory?


you want to get closer to the outpaces of language, where materials

touch. to move between the grid, a constellation of soft bones

surrounding heart:

                                        —i wanted a name for it.                                                                                        —i wanted a name for it.

Copies of Anemal Uter Meck available at SPD and our online shop.

Advance Praise for Anemal Uter Meck

Mg Roberts’ Anemal Uter Meck defies category at every turn. Here we are repeatedly being reborn into different forms as we heal our severed wings and fly. Our new body inhabitations are woven with scars and our every encounter with meaning is eroticized. Are we the so-called alien forming the foundation of the real or an impossible unicorn creating new rituals for a world that awaits us? These poems are where a constant ‘hallucination of presence’ adds origins and ways to being monstrously and divinely human. With her torch of internal expansion Mg Roberts brings us the fire and lights up the Sea. -Roberto Harrison

Every so often I pause & watch the clothes spin, a child’s face pressed into steamy glass door. The face reflected back a twin. – “the hallucination of presence” The cracked tile, roadways for the reddish brown roaches. –“large and small particulate matter” Children skip between washings. A woman screams. An outburst of infant howls. – “Watch the lines follow the rules of perspective” Conversations on constant loop. Footfalls too. The manager sings jesus and more brown roaches redden the cracked tiles. The wheels on the carts go round and round, constant loop, like the cycling and recycling of image idea perception memory in this book that feels at once whimsical in danger and muscular. Mg Roberts “come to [us] until [we] forget [we] were someone/something else”. -Metta Sáma

All my life, I’ve seen “shoes hanging in pairs on wires […] or names stricken in spray paint,” like la Mg Roberts strikes in this book.  

I know her, the overpasses, the boys at school who want you in pieces. And you know this writer too; she has no shame. Nor should she. The writer is not afraid to show your rotting, bobbing plastic, how it gets, not just under your skin, but in your lymph nodes, your left and right breast. The paint from the can sparkles your lungs. And this shit is in all the animals around us too, and our daughters.

You thought you knew what poems do, but did you know that they are raptors with fluorescent feathers? Mg Roberts knows. –Vickie Vértiz, author of Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut, forthcoming from The University of Arizona Press

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