The poems of Vanessa Angélica Villarreal transport readers into a wilderness, a porous border world of dual (or multiple) identities. Visually striking, rooted in the borderlands, Beast Meridian is a fiercely feminist book that refuses easy closure and answers. The lines blaze with anger and empathy, and the craft astonishes. Beast Meridian will serve as an example of what’s possible in American poetry in the twenty-first century. In a word: gorgeous.” — Whiting Award Selection Committee, 2019