Author Event: Inside the Umber Iris by Erik Manuel Soto

Join us for a special event with Erik Manuel Soto, author of Inside the Umber Iris. This event is free, but we appreciate your RSVP below so we can plan for your attendance.

Inside the Umber Iris journeys through landscapes of myth, memory, and survival. In poems that move between Mexico, California, and Nevada, Erik Manuel Soto entwines Aztec deities, Catholic ritual, ancestral voices, and dreamlike visions with the lived realities of family, addiction, and generational trauma. Written in English and Spanish, the collection summons a chorus of jaguars, hummingbirds, and shadows, weaving a surreal yet intimate exploration of grief, resilience, and transformation. Both tender and hallucinatory, these poems reveal how language itself becomes ritual—a way to endure, to remember, and to reimagine.

"Erik Manuel Soto’s Inside the Umber Iris is a book that journeys across the borderlines of sense and into the mind of a sensuous and wounded poet. These poems combine a plainspokenness about personal pain and familial inheritance with an ornate sense of ritual across time and space, what he calls “folkloric dissonance”. The poems address family, spirituality, the natural landscapes of Mexico, California, and Nevada, a soiled mango, an opening sky. The world of Soto’s poems is at once threatening and comforting; reading him reminds me of the transformative power of language as it resonates across the artificial barriers we set up against one another. This is a deeply felt and wildly hallucinated book of visions." —Jared Stanley

"In Erik Manuel Soto’s debut volume we meet a 21st century folkloric surrealist of harmony, dissonance, and fracture who time travels through Aztec mythology, voicemail, and our shores where “coral reefs suffocate” to make poems that pierce and ache. In a voice both calm and restless, haunted by Lorca, image into image into image falls and breaks, ever-slipping in a visionary, dream-like consciousness formed by the harrowing hallways and doorframes of a childhood spent dodging addiction and violence. Catholic rituals, old world medicine, ancestral figures appear alongside those of the Aztec underworld in a multilingual (English, Spanish, Nahuatl) chorus. “Insatiable dadaists” are as likely to appear as blue-tailed lizards or jaguars and serpents. But it’s Soto’s quiet tonality verging on a prayerful silence that I love most. It’s when Soto almost disappears, as when he writes, “Falling into solitude is not a punishment, it is learning how to be a hummingbird.” A poet." —Gillian Conoley

"Emerald, obsidian, cenote, collarbone. Erik Manuel Soto wanders Inside the Umber Iris armed with materials that favor the surrender of a body to bewilderment; and that ordain a landscape at once sublunary and infernal, pre-colonial and surreal. In this superbly imagined work, a Rorschach inkblot is to the morning skyline as the deity Tezcatlipoca is to opuntia and wildflower—elements that make possible an initiation into the secrets of the tribe, what Georges Bataille called “the power to offer life the perspective of radiance.” With stark angularity, ardor, and overwhelming affirmation, Soto reverses the genealogies of brutality and dependence in a timely reshaping of the world now primed for self-transfiguration." —Roberto Tejada

"The son’s witnessing eye gives rise to an expressive power of image that counters God’s silence and transcends paternal violence and addiction. Embedded at the heart of this book, the mother’s suffering and the poet’s acute response generate a deeply organic, integrated, and vibrant ecosystem of sound, metaphor, and subtle narrative. In these passionate and moving lyrics, image morphs into image over and again as Soto creates virtuoso chains of transformation that satisfy, surprise, and delight." —Kathleen Winter

Erik Manuel Soto is a Mexican-American writer from California. His poems have appeared in Volt, Huizache, Sonora Review, Action, Spectacle and other magazines and publications. Winner of the inaugural Gronk Nicandro first book prize for poetry, Erik debuts his full-length, poetry collection, Inside the Umber Iris, in Fall 2025.

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