Find out of this soil, a knife at the Garden Party Collective!
what is the body but a vessel, a message, a revolution? and in that revolution, is the body turning towards itself to be free.
One of the winners of the Garden Party Collective 2026 Chapbook Contest, “out of this soil, a knife” is a curated collection of 25 poems trying to find ways to dissect/detangle/dismantle systems of oppression by finding hope/liberation in the body/revolution.
Exploring the connective tissues between American prison systems and destroyed Palestinian hospitals, Southwestern dark skies and Florida beetles, these poems move from one portal to the next looking not for answers, but for the questions we don’t want to ask.
Is there room for poetry in the midst of a famine? What tools are available to us when we are fighting a genocide? Which of us are willing to build towards a collective ever-present nowness? What are we willing to let go of in order to save ourselves?
What People Are Saying
Though Miguel asserts… “I can not always paint hope over a sunset.” That is in fact what I am currently feeling after having been protected, held, covered, agitated, enlightened, and met in Miguel’s work. The spirit woven in this work is that of a tender, diligent gardener, indeed. A righteously angry and knowingly faithful one, at that! Alhamdullilah! This collection is nothing short of a spiritual guide for the modern day revolutionary.
— Melissa Ferrer Civil, First Poet Laureate of Kansas City, founder of “A Nation in Exile”
A New American voice in poetry is emerging. In Miguel Santiago Flores’s “out of this soil, a knife”, the point of incision is where the healing will eventually begin, but first we must address the wounds sustained collectively as moral injury… Miguel’s use of form and language cuts through our united state of apathy… On one hand, there is a vigil; on the other, a call for judgment and justice.
— Huascar Medina, 2019-2022 Poet Laureate Emeritus of Kansas, author of “Protest as Love Poem” and “Un Mango Grows in Kansas”
Examining the entangled roots of revolution and the body, out of this soil, a knife is an origin story, a sermon for abolition, a block party. miguel santiago flores weaves musical apocaloptimism that does not just imagine liberation, but gets in the dirt and returns to the soil something beautiful and life-giving.