She Who Eats Tourists by Atalaya Magdalena

About the book: "I wrote She Who Eats Tourists when traveling, via scholarships and favors, between the US Southwest, Midwest, and East Coast. I was looking for something that I didn't realize at the time was my girlhood, and I missed my home. Because of the direction I traveled, I felt the eyes of a white tourist, superimposed into in my own, reversed back to the East, where the settler colonial imagination has mostly strongly emanated, and irradiated since the dawn of Westward Expansion. I needed to understand what those eyes had done to me. This poetry collection is essentially various attempts to write one kind of poem, a poem that will feel, as a consolation, like justice to read." 

About the author: There’s a coyote on the subway. People mostly don’t care. Maybe they would care if it was snarling or asking for money, but it, from here forward she*, is simply looking at the route map. Which is harmless if disconcerting. One man, or boy, a Manhattan summer intern on summer from a mid-range midwestern college, is made uncomfortable when the coyote takes the seat next to him, placing her paws carefully within the orange rectangle. So, discreetly, he dials 911. He tells the police dispatcher about the situation in a hushed whisper. He stops whispering when he remembers coyotes don’t speak English. Or presumably any other language.

*Atalaya Magdalena is an artist, writer and sculptor