POETRY
COLLECTIONS

I come from women of corn and cotton fields / of machete and fire / of water and stone / I am the daughter of a river and mango tree / my tongue came to me through the jocote seed / my heart belonged to the ocean / before it found my body
- A Salvadoran Heart found in Corazón
published in 2017 by Not A Cult Media
Corazón is a love story. It is about the constant hunger for love. It is about feeding that hunger with another person and finding that sometimes it isn’t enough. Salgado creates a world in which the heart can live anywhere; her fat brown body, her parents home country, a lover, a toothbrush, a mango, or a song. It is a celebration of heartache, of how it can ruin us, but most importantly how we always survive it and return to ourselves whole.
While most of us would like to fast-forward through romantic breakups, zooming straight past the tight chest, stomach knots, and weak bones, Poet Yesika Salgado is commemorating the anguish. — Bustle

published 2018 by Not A Cult Media
Tesoro is a story of family, survival, and the formative power of the women in Salgado’s life. It is a telling of the balance between love and perseverance. Tesoro is an unearthing of the sacred connections that make a person whole; the treasure we forever keep with us when we learn from those we love, when we mourn those we’ve lost, and what grows in between.
“This is the moment that leads you to take a harder look at yourself and how you have ultimately been shaped by everything that came before you. This is the moment, these are the feelings; this is Yesika Salgado’s Tesoro.”
— NPR Books

published 2019 by Not A Cult Media
Hermosa is the path to becoming one’s own home. A thread pulled when Salgado thinks about who she is and who she has been. Beyond the survival, grief, and fight, Hermosa lives in the small moments hidden beneath it all. A journey of firsts, of mistakes, of celebrations, of the love, the crush, the disaster, the rebuilding, and the never-ending cycle of growth.
“[Salgado] stayed true to her voice, and it has paid off.”
— Los Angeles Times

