Kadupul Flower Poems

Fresno, California, may be the nation’s breadbasket, but it is also a food desert to some who call it home. Summer temperatures find their niche in the triple digits, and resilience makes its name in the fields and on the streets . . . it pours from the mouths of the children. But dignity, all too often, comes with a price tag. The last $5.48 left on the food stamp card or the $200-plus it costs to ship over plant cuttings from Ecuador. Because even nature isn’t immune to commercialism. Peel back the price tags and recall the meaning of worth in Kadupul Flower, a social-environmental justice collection from debut poet Kimberly Vargas Agnese. Social and environmental justice converge in the intersectional work of Kadupul Flower. The poetry collection is distinctive in its uniting of several themes. The set deals with poverty – including homelessness – as well as racism, sexual assault, and ecological justice. The collection is, at its heart, about dignity, but the theme of dignity extends beyond the typical concept of ‘human’ dignity to encompass ‘environmental’ dignity, as well.

Kimberly Vargas Agnese makes her home in the smoggy California Central Valley. Kimberly spends her time cultivating a young food forest called Meadow Arc, praying and writing advocacy poetry. Her writing appears in "Anacua Literary Arts Journal," "The Seventh Wave," "Rappahannock Review" and "Awakened Voices,” among others. Kimberly’ s full-length collection, "Red String on a Saguaro Cactus" was named a finalist for the 2022 André s Montoya Poetry Prize, awarded biannually by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. To read more of her work, please visit www.kimberlyvargasagnese.com.