Raúl Sánchez w/ Priscilla Long, WHEN WE WERE WATER

Poet Raúl Sánchez returns to the store for his latest collection of poetry, When We Were Water, an abundant new work that continues to experiment in forms and shapes, with odes and acrostic poems, visions and flashbacks, elegies and spirit-journeys, but always with humor and human vitality and a golden thread connecting to Latin roots. He is joined by fellow poet Priscilla Long.

"In Raúl Sánchez's When We Were Water, selections from his books All Our Brown-Skinned Angels and When There Were No Borders travel to us with abundant new work that continues to experiment in forms and shapes, with odes and acrostic poems, visions and flashbacks, elegies and spirit-journeys, but always with humor and human vitality and a golden thread connecting to Latin roots. This work is free and playful, jazzy and up close, exploding with intensity. These are questing poems, liberation poems, devotional poems, ecstatic poems, comic poems, sincere and lived and opening out."—Douglas Cole, author of The Cabin at the End of the World

"With his new poems, Sánchez expands his everyman vision by focusing closer to home-he tends the garden, washes the dishes, kills a spider, gazes at the stars, and records his dreams. He sees the people and remembers the history most of us overlook. He immerses himself in the natural world. All the while, Sánchez builds on the ground he has previously staked out-celebrating and memorializing family, moving seamlessly between cultures and languages, and believing in the power of poetry to save us."—John Burgess, author of Punk Poems

Raúl Sánchez is a Seattle-based author and mentor of bilingual poetry. His book All Our Brown-Skinned Angels (MoonPath Press, 2012) launched his name into the roster of published poets. His cultural background allows him to use passages from his early life in México City and apply the lessons learned in his work. Since retirement, he has volunteered at the King County Juvenile Detention Center mentoring incarcerated youth through the PONGO method. His mentoring in the schools (WITS and Jack Straw Cultural Center), has been essential to his poetic growth because as he puts it, “The youth see the world differently than him,” therefore he learns from their outlook. Raúl is an avid spiral thinker, driving in a straight line then suddenly turning left or right, but never losing the reader in the detour. Raúl is a self-taught poet who keeps on writing, teaching, helping the youth, and reading in public, allowing his voice to carry the words like dandelion fuzzies into the ears of those who listen.

Priscilla Long is author of nine books including Cartographies of Home: Poems (MoonPath Press, 2026) and On Spaces and Colors (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming Autumn 2026). Her how-to-write guide is The Writer’s Portable Mentor. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar. Her awards include a National Magazine Award and ten of her essays have been honored as “notable” in various years of Best American Essays. She has an MFA from the University of Washington. To learn more, go to www.priscillalong.com.

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