Grace. That is the first word that comes to mind when I reminisce about my time in the Poetry Collective. This year-long program helps poets create the covalent bonds that bind whispering ideas into poetry. I had the great fortune of working with Andrea Rexilius and Suzi Q. Smith. Our cohort was split into groups, and Andrea Rexilius selected me as one of her mentees that year. Andrea is the kind of individual who takes the time to listen to your soul. She understood the density of my work, the experience and pain bleeding through the page.

I did not know what to expect beyond the website descriptions. We spent the first few months working through exercises and readings that helped me bring my idea to completion. During the first half of the year, both cohorts took courses from poets who spoke to us approximately once a month, and we also met one-on-one with our mentors. We got to know one another, our work, and how each of us explored the world through our pages. Most importantly, we became a poetic family. My fellow poets understand that grace is given through love, loving critique, and honest feedback. Suzi and Andrea created such a safe environment that, regardless of the comment, I always felt the care my fellow poets had for me and for my idea.

I met Suzi about a year before I was selected for the 2024 Poetry Collective cohort. I first heard her during a poetry reading in my second year of my MFA, where I watched her perform her soul-moving piece “For Cedric.” I was hooked. I am nothing like Suzi, but Suzi carries a different kind of duende, black notes. Her kind words and encouragement helped me find the black notes and music buried inside dry Supreme Court legalese.

I came into the Poetry Collective with a mature idea: Liberty-N-Re(Sol)ution. In retrospect, I feel that regardless of how much or how little work I had done on my manuscript, the lessons from the Poetry Collective would have been equally helpful.

Liberty-N-Re(Sol)ution grapples with the meaning of humanity in light of two hundred and fifty years of Supreme Court jurisprudence that has systematically stripped humanity from our society. I felt the need to right a wrong, but not one that was easy to execute. Because of this, I decided to erase nine decisions. Andrea saw the passion, but she also gave me agency to trust myself, my instincts, and, most importantly, to believe in my work as much as she did. She encouraged me to submit my manuscript to publishers and to send individual poems out into the world. Today, I am working with Dead Reckoning Collective to publish Liberty-N-Re(Sol)ution, and several individual poems have been published by Collateral Journal, Acentos Review, and various anthologies.

Meet the Author

Enrique Gautier is a poet, educator, veteran, and interdisciplinary writer whose work examines how institutional language shapes identity, power, and survival. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a Juris Doctor and is a veteran of the United States Navy. His writing emerges from lived experience at the intersections of war, law, migration, race, disability, and ecology, and is deeply informed by his background in legal training, military service, and community-based teaching.

The Poetry Collective

The Poetry Collective is a manuscript-focused curriculum for poets. It’s a flexible, affordable program aimed at helping you produce a finished, high-quality book of poems that reads as a cohesive collection, not just a bundle of singular works.