Tweetspeak Poetry

  • Home
  • FREE prompts
  • Earth Song
  • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • Teaching Tools
  • Books, Etc.
  • Patron Love

Poets and Poems: Jordan Pérez and “Santa Tarantula”

By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Woman in field Perez Santa Tarantula

Jordan Pérez writes of trafficking, prisons, Cuba, and abuse

I’ve seen some creative and arresting titles for poetry collections, but Santa Tarantula by Jordan Pérez may have just topped them all.

Santa Tarantula. Saint Tarantula.

My one personal experience with tarantulas (seeing one in movies like Home Alone doesn’t count) was in West Texas in 1975. I was in the parking lot of an oil pumping station, surrounded by miles of, well, West Texas. A tarantula about the size of my palm scurried less than a foot in front of me. I did what any self-respecting city slicker would do. I froze. And I stifled the yell in my throat.

Despite all the myths surrounding these large, hairy spiders, their venom is not deadly. It can cause allergic reactions, but the innate fear many people have is due to the idea itself of spiders (not to mention very large ones (and the one I encountered was very large)). When I see a poetry title like Santa Tarantula, I have to wonder what’s inside.

It is a collection with bite — not a fatal one, to be sure, but it does bite. The poems are jarring, jolting you out of your comfortable reading chair, say, or the quiet life you might be leading. They are written with passion and conviction. The poems are not polemical or political; they are closer to statements of reality, a reality that is difficult to grasp and understand, a reality that needs to be changed.

Pérez writes of subjects we’d prefer not to examine or at least not too closely. Subjects like child sexual abuse. Human trafficking. The imprisonment of people in Cuba. She also gives a voice to women in the Old Testament, like Tamar, Lot’s daughter, Delilah, Gomer, and Jael. No matter what she’s writing about, she will shove you out of complacency.

Read this poem by Pérez about childbirth, and ask yourself, who is actually giving birth here?

Upended

Santa Tarantula PerezThe sheets have been torn
into strips and the yucca has been left
unboiled in the pot
and the tarantulas have lost
legs protecting their young.
The butterfly jasmine has been
itself at the very root to pay homage.
My mother’s dress has slipped over her shoulder
but we are birthing babies here?
Who cares about a shoulder?
There is also blood on her cheek
but I do not tell her that
because it makes her look strong
in the way that I, at twelve,
want to be strong; in the way that
might confuse birth and death,
in the way you find yourself upended
into the underwater reflection
and simply keep stomping
through the mud.

Jordan Pérez

Jordan Pérez

Santa Tarantula is Pérez’s first poetry collection and was awarded the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. She received an MFA degree from American University in 2019. Her poems have been published in several literary journals, including The Mississippi Review, Poetry, Poetry International, and others. She works as director of communications for SOSA, which is dedicated to the prevention of child sexual abuse. She has also received the Poetry International Prize and the Joy Harjo Prize, and she appeared in Season 2 of Undercover Underage, a docuseries on sex trafficking stings broadcast on several television channels.

The collection will be published Feb. 1, 2024.

What Pérez is saying in the poems of Santa Tarantula: don’t turn your face away. You know these things happen; you know children are being trafficked and women kidnapped into sexual slavery. Don’t pretend this isn’t your problem. If you’re part of humanity, it is your problem. And you’re going to have to ask what you should do about it.

Photo by Cloud Shepherd, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.

Browse more book reviews

How to Read a Poem by Tania Runyan

5 star

Buy How to Read a Poem Now!

How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.

“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”

—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
Latest posts by Glynn Young (see all)
  • Poets and Poems: L.L. Barkat and “Beyond the Glass” - May 22, 2025
  • A History of Children’s Stories: “The Haunted Wood” by Sam Leith - May 20, 2025
  • World War II Had Its Poets, Too - May 15, 2025

Filed Under: article, book reviews, Books, Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, Poets

Try Every Day Poems...

Comments

  1. Laura Lynn Brown says

    October 25, 2023 at 1:25 pm

    That’s a pretty arresting cover illustration, too! Thanks for introducing us to this one. I have seen one tarantula in the wild — on the edge of the main road running through Petit Jean State Park in central Arkansas. I got close enough to take some good pictures and was not scared. It seemed funny that they would use the blacktop road as well as the more protected grassy and forested areas, but of course they would.

    I like the way this poem shows that tarantulas, too, will take risks and make sacrifices to fiercely protect their young.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Take How to Read a Poem

Get the Introduction, the Billy Collins poem, and Chapter 1

get the sample now

Welcome to Tweetspeak

New to Tweetspeak Poetry? Start here, in The Mischief Café. You're a regular? Check out our May Menu

Patron Love

❤️

Welcome a little patron love, when you help keep the world poetic.

The Graphic Novel

"Stunning, heartbreaking, and relevant illustrations"

Callie Feyen, teacher

read a summary of The Yellow Wallpaper

meet The Yellow Wallpaper characters

How to Write Poetry

Your Comments

  • Poets and Poems: L.L. Barkat and “Beyond the Glass” - Tweetspeak Poetry on Love, Etc.: Poems of Love, Laughter, Longing & Loss
  • Glynn on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Sandra Fox Murphy on World War II Had Its Poets, Too
  • Glynn on Poets and Poems: Kelly Belmonte and “The Mother of All Words”

Featured In

We're happy to have been featured in...

The Huffington Post

The Paris Review

The New York Observer

Tumblr Book News

Stay in Touch With Us

Categories

Learn to Write Form Poems

How to Write an Acrostic

How to Write a Ballad

How to Write a Catalog Poem

How to Write a Ghazal

How to Write a Haiku

How to Write an Ode

How to Write a Pantoum

How to Write a Rondeau

How to Write a Sestina

How to Write a Sonnet

How to Write a Villanelle

5 FREE POETRY PROMPTS

Get 5 FREE inbox poetry prompts from the popular book How to Write a Poem

Shakespeare Resources

Poetry Classroom: Sonnet 18

Common Core Picture Poems: Sonnet 73

Sonnet 104 Annotated

Sonnet 116 Annotated

Character Analysis: Romeo and Juliet

Character Analysis: Was Hamlet Sane or Insane?

Why Does Hamlet Wait to Kill the King?

10 Fun Shakespeare Resources

About Shakespeare: Poet and Playwright

Top 10 Shakespeare Sonnets

See all 154 Shakespeare sonnets in our Shakespeare Library!

Explore Work From Black Poets

About Us

  • • A Blessing for Writers
  • • Our Story
  • • Meet Our Team
  • • Literary Citizenship
  • • Poet Laura
  • • Poetry for Life: The 5 Vital Approaches
  • • T. S. Poetry Press – All Books
  • • Contact Us

Write With Us

  • • 5 FREE Poetry Prompts-Inbox Delivery
  • • 30 Days to Richer Writing Workshop
  • • Poetry Prompts
  • • Submissions
  • • The Write to Poetry

Read With Us

  • • All Our Books
  • • Book Club
  • • Every Day Poems—Subscribe! ✨
  • • Literacy Extras
  • • Poems to Listen By: Audio Series
  • • Poet-a-Day
  • • Poets and Poems
  • • 50 States Projects
  • • Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems Library
  • • Edgar Allan Poe Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Blake Poems Arts & Experience Library
  • • William Shakespeare Sonnet Library

Celebrate With Us

  • • Poem on Your Pillow Day
  • • Poetic Earth Month
  • • Poet in a Cupcake Day
  • • Poetry at Work Day
  • • Random Acts of Poetry Day
  • • Take Your Poet to School Week
  • • Take Your Poet to Work Day

Gift Ideas

  • • Every Day Poems
  • • Our Shop
  • • Everybody Loves a Book!

Connect

  • • Donate
  • • Blog Buttons
  • • By Heart
  • • Shop for Tweetspeak Fun Stuff

Copyright © 2025 Tweetspeak Poetry · FAQ, Disclosure & Privacy Policy