Love Letters & Disillusion / Cartas de Amor y Desilusión explores love after its illusions have faded, revealing what heartbreak can teach about forgiveness, memory, faith, and knowing when to let go. At what point did you recognize that these individual poems were collectively telling a larger story about your life?

The letters were written over many years. Writing has always been one of my love languages. If I love and care about someone, chances are they will eventually receive a poem or letter from me. Over time, I accumulated quite a few of these expressions of affection, but I also recognized that love wasn’t always sweetness and tenderness.

When the idea came to me to gather my love letters into a collection, I realized that I couldn’t tell the whole story without exploring disillusionment. I already had poems about heartbreak and disappointment, but I deliberately revisited certain memories to capture those experiences more fully. I even wrote a response to a poem that had once been written for me.

Only when I had captured both the tenderness and the disillusionment did I feel the collection was complete. Duality has always been central to how I understand love and life.

The collection addresses family members, friends, colleagues, lovers, and your younger self. What interested you about examining love across so many different kinds of relationships?

Love, much like life, is not linear, although we sometimes wish it were. It evolves, diminishes, grows, and transforms alongside us. The way we experience love as children is not necessarily how we understand it as adults, and the love we share with family differs from what we experience through friendship, romance, or even our relationship with ourselves.

I wanted to explore these different expressions of love because each has taught me something about who I am and who I’ve become. To capture that honestly, I had to revisit the people and experiences that shaped my understanding of love throughout my life.

Love is one of life’s greatest teachers. The people we encounter can embody its many forms, but ultimately, we ourselves are also embodiments of love.

What have you learned about yourself through revisiting relationships that once felt very different from the way you understand them now?

I’ve learned that you cannot change another person; ultimately, you can only change yourself. If you cannot accept someone for who they are, perhaps you shouldn’t be with them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge one another to grow, but when our fundamental values are incompatible, forcing the relationship will only create more suffering. Anything that’s forced is bound to break.

I’ve also come to see romantic relationships as two people’s traumas trying to coexist, sometimes even trying to dance with one another. Each person brings their own wounds, fears, experiences, and unresolved conflicts into the relationship. The challenge is learning how to navigate those internal struggles while confronting the external challenges of loving another person.

In many ways, romantic love becomes an attempt to find harmony between two people who are still learning how to find peace within themselves.

What do you hope bilingual readers experience as they move between the English and Spanish versions?

Above all, I hope they experience connection. Whether someone reads my work in English or Spanish, my intention remains the same: to reach another person through words. Readers don’t have to agree with everything I write, but if they recognize themselves in even one poem, then I feel I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.

For bilingual readers, I hope there’s an additional layer of appreciation in experiencing how the same poem can evoke different emotions depending on the language. Although the meaning may remain consistent, the rhythm, musicality, and emotional weight of certain words can change considerably between English and Spanish. One version might resonate more deeply with a reader than the other.

Translation has always been an interesting creative challenge for me because some expressions simply don’t carry the same beauty or emotional force when translated literally. A direct translation might preserve the meaning but diminish the poetry.

For me, the process becomes a balancing act between remaining faithful to the original message and preserving the musicality and emotional depth of the work. Ultimately, I want both languages to offer readers an authentic poetic experience.

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