Books

Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press, 2023) can be purchased directly from Mouthfeel Press. 

Praise for Incantation: 

“A dazzling and provocative second collection that entices readers with its playfulness in language and spirit as it moves from internal to external concerns about fear and chaos. At times reflective in poems like “Battlegrounds,” “The Way Men Use Me,” or “Comfort Food for White Spaces.” Each section engages with a mix of conventional and unconventional diction and syntax that is melodic and mesmerizing, including concrete poems that dance playfully across the page in shapes and forms like couplets, prose poetry, and tercets. There are moments of resilience urging readers to confront injustices and strive for a better world. These poems will entice you to return, leaving you with “something to savor” every time.” – Ruben Quesada, editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, author of Revelations 

“Bermejo’s poems are sensuous, sensual offerings for a tender self that rails against the ragged world. Each is a container crafted to hold the raw yearnings of a body that lives and witnesses state violences against BIPOC, female, and undocumented bodies. Incantation do more than conjure hope for a vague future, they demand accountability and enact the healing we need now.”  – Carribean Fragoza, author of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You

“Incantation marks the resting place of the dead and slaughtered, but also celebrates the living and clairvoyant. Combining elements of identity, place, research, and home, Bermejo disrupts our dismissal of political poetry; she enlivens language to challenge our complacency and expose our ennui to coax us all to hold on to one another for dear life.” – Monica Prince, author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem 

“In Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites the living and the dead face each other: sometimes in dreams, sometimes in bodies, sometimes in peace, sometimes in tension. With one eye to life and the other to whatever comes after, Bermejo crafts a language that is incantatory and immediate. Musical, urgent, affectionate and unafraid, these poems believe in living, but also believe that the living have things to learn from the dead.” – Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios.

“While navigating white spaces and ghosts on the battlefield among the monuments, the speaker encounters racism, misogyny, and state violence. Read this book for transformative songs of Los Angeles, borderlands, and sites of war. Incantation believes inexorably in freedom, in community, family, and love—and the ability for words to not only name that which maims us, but also, that which restores us.” – Cathy Linh Che, author of Split

 

Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016) can be purchased directly from Sundress Publications. 

Praise for Posada:

“I am moved by Xochitl-Julisa’s work, her embrace of familia, of places long gone and present, of abandoned things too, near or in a neighborhood house yet filled with luminous power as a ‘black lava molcajete,’ a ‘mano,’ and many kinds of cacti — enduring, inscrutable, fierce & makers of nectar.” – Juan Felipe Herrera, former Poet Laureate of the United States

“Her voice is formidable, her language clear and complex at the same time.” – Luis J. Rodriguez, former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles

“Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo explores what it means to live on the border, a literal and figurative image that takes on multiple meanings. There are the rich and vibrant stories of her Mexican grandparents and parents, stories she carries with her and finds still relevant in modern-day Los Angeles; there is a traditional view of womanhood and the reality of being a contemporary woman in the United States; there is a straddlle of Spanish and English, a clamor of tongues; there is the dividing actual line between Mexico and the United States, which people risk their lives to cross each day.” – Terry Wolverton, author, Embers (Red Hen Press)

Accolades: A Women Who Submit Anthology (Jamii Publishing, 2020) edited by Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera and Rachael Warecki can be purchased from Indie Bound.

Praise for WWS:

“The Women Who Submit community has taught me so much. Submitting is difficult for most of us and it is as important as writing and editing. Acceptances and rejections should be celebrated because you engaged in the process. Keep track. Most importantly encouragement is validating and feeds courage.” – Romaine Washington, author, Sirens in Her Belly (Jamii Publishing)

“As a new Los Angeles resident, Women Who Submit gave me the opportunity to grow relationships with other women and nonbinary people in the organization. I am reminded always that my participation is never passive but one in which leadership is always encouraged. WWS is certainly a model for what we can lean into in the present.” – Muriel Leung, author, Bone Confetti (Noemi Press)

Things to Know for Compañer@s: A No More Deaths Volunteer Guide can be purchased for $5 by contacting the author at xochitljulisa@gmail.com. All proceeds go to No More Deaths.

From a review by Marie Lecrivain at poeticdiversity.org:

“Things to Know is a powerful poetic vehicle that transports the reader right into the middle of the terrifying, perilous journey Central American immigrants risk for the chance at a better life within the boundaries of the United States.”