by Jael Montellano
He had me at ‘antelucan.’ Adjective, meaning: before the dawn.
This is how Ruben’s poem “Aubade,” from his new collection Brutal Companion (Barrow Street Press), opens: “Antelucan, we lie—your body moons against mine.” When I read this aloud, I gasped.
I should be forthright—more than Ruben’s diction had drawn my interest prior to this line. He and I first crossed paths over his collection of edited essays Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (the interview for which you can read here), and have, since then, remained in touch. He’s been a teacher to me, an advisor, and even my fellow Duolingo quester. So I know precisely where a word like antelucan comes from, ravenous learner that Ruben is. I was therefore overjoyed to discuss Brutal Companion with him.
JM: I found the breadth of your collection so expansive, so lyrical, from meditations on art and social issues to examinations of faith, to the vibrancy of queer experience, to the miniscule atom and the far depths of space. I would like to begin by asking you what the title Brutal Companion means to you and how you feel your collection speaks to this? I’m mindful of Jericho Brown’s beautiful quote about your collection being “about the fact of longing.” What did the Ruben who undertook this project consciously long for versus the Ruben who completed it?
RQ: I’m happy we have another opportunity to talk about poetry. You’re a thoughtful reader and critic. The title Brutal Companion encapsulates the contradictory nature of life. The word “brutal” evokes raw, unforgiving aspects—grief, loss, pain. Yet, “companion” implies a connection for someone or something to travel with us through these challenging times. It’s about holding onto beauty and connection, even when life is cruel. My goal was never to lose sight of the moments of grace that help us endure it.
The phrase “the fact of longing” suggests a kind of acceptance. Jericho’s observation that longing is a “fact” highlights its inescapability. Longing is a constant and unyielding part of reality. Longing is not just about missing someone who is gone—it’s about the desire to keep their presence alive, to resist the finality of death. My poems conjure memories, mythologize those lost, and search for signs of life beyond the grave. Longing becomes the tether between the living and the dead, the past and the present.
As I completed this collection, I came to embrace longing as a part of me, a necessary companion that, while often painful, also gives my life meaning and purpose. The Ruben who finished this collection is more at peace with the idea that longing, like grief, never entirely disappears—it becomes a companion, both brutal and necessary, that shapes who I am becoming.
JM: I had the very distinct sentiment of walking through an art gallery through my act of reading, because of your musicality and diction choices and the way they described quality of light. Of course, that is intentional because several of the poems are ekphrastic and reference European masters, and I believe you frequent museums and had a residence in Spain while you wrote? What is it about a work of visual art that begs you to respond once you’ve encountered it? Let’s, for example, take “Woman in Black / After Édouard Manet.” How does artistic conversation fit into writing an ekphrastic poem and how do you feel ekphrastic poems function when the reader is familiar with the context of the original artwork and when they aren’t?
RQ: The stillness and flamboyance of visual art invites contemplation transcend the artwork through language. Art speaks to both my intellect and emotions, challenging me through narrative, symbolism, or mood captured within a single frame. This may be why I was drawn to prose poetry. It more accurately represents how I write by hand in my notebooks. A visual image offers a new lens through which to view these familiar ideas. A recent study in the Netherlands found that the brain is stimulated 10 times stronger when viewing original artwork instead of a reproduction.
When I wrote about “Woman in Black / After Édouard Manet,” I wasn’t merely responding to the formal aspects of Manet’s painting but also to the figure’s mysteriousness and ambiguity. The painting is titled The Parisienne, ca. 1875, and depicts a woman wearing a high-collar, black silk dress. I viewed it at the Art Institute of Chicago. The brushstrokes make the dress appear to be made of feathers. I wanted to write about what might exist beyond the canvas. What is her story? How does her solitude reflect my own? In this way, ekphrasis became a bridge or an artistic conversation where I respond to the painting with observation, imagination, empathy, and personal experience. Simultaneously, I find Manet’s relationship to his contemporaries remarkable. Readers will have to find that out for themselves.
When the reader is familiar with the original artwork and when they aren’t, both experiences can be powerful but in different ways. When a reader is familiar with the artwork, the poem acts as a layer of interpretation, offering a new perspective through which to view the original. It’s like conversing with the poem and the painting simultaneously, where the reader can draw connections between the visual and verbal, noticing what the poet highlights or omits. On the other hand, when the reader isn’t familiar with the original artwork, the poem stands alone as its creation. The poem becomes a painting inviting readers to imagine the unseen and create a mental image of the art that inspired the poem.
JM: Speaking of musicality, in your Letras Latinas’ Author Spotlight you mentioned rhythm and sound from poets such as Diane Mehta, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Philip Metres resonates with you. What rhythm(s) and sound(s) are you listening for when reading other poets? What are your musical influences outside of poetry that have tuned your poetic ear? Do you write with music in your atmosphere?
RQ: When I read other poets, I listen for a rhythm that pulls me into the poem’s emotional core. Rhythm is how a poem breathes—it gives life to the words, guiding the reader’s pace, intensity, and even the silences between lines. With poets like Diane Mehta, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Philip Metres, the fluidity of their rhythm and the way their words cascade or pull back resonate deeply with me. Their poems possess a musicality that’s not just in their choice of words but also in how those words create movement, echo, and reverberation. I’m also attuned to sound in a way that seeks texture. I listen for the interplay of hard and soft consonants, how vowels stretch or tighten, and how a single word can shift the tone of an entire poem.
Outside of poetry, my musical influences include popular and classical music, as well as ambient soundscapes. Classical music, with its layered complexity, inspires my poetic structures—there’s a precision and grandeur in the form that I aspire to in some of my poems. Ambient soundscapes, with their subtle builds and vast emotional range, often mirror the moods I’m trying to evoke in my writing. I put together two Spotify Playlists for Brutal Companion—it’ll be featured by Largehearted Boy.
When I write, I don’t always have music playing, but a rhythm in my mind feels almost musical. Sometimes, I’ll turn to instrumental music—something unobtrusive that lets my thoughts expand—if I need help accessing a certain emotional space. But silence can be just as powerful, especially when I’m focusing on the inherent music of language itself.
JM: Many of the poems in the collection touch on faith in a very intimate way. Indeed, part I opens with a quote from one of the Beautitudes, Matthew 5:4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” and then there are the poems “The Crowning,” “On Knowing,” with lines such as “You settle, / a silent stone / in the sweet / arteries of my hand” and “God, forgive me if I find / no fixed design in the downfall of man.” What role has faith played in your life? What quandries did you explore through this lens of faith?
RQ: I have lived half of my life in an analog world. When I was in graduate school, Eliot’s Four Quartets was a salve. Eliot’s crisis of faith and modernity became a lens for me to understand the limitation of human understanding and the danger of placing too much faith in human ingenuity. Eliot is the Nostradamus of poetry. We are reliant on technology. We are distracted. More recently, there is a growing realization that technological progress does not inherently lead to moral or spiritual progress. My relationship with technology has been one of questioning, searching, and sometimes feeling abandoned by the structures that are supposed to offer comfort. Faith is about navigating the space between belief and doubt, between what we hope for and what we fear is true.
Faith has played a complicated role in my life, and that complexity is mirrored in many of the poems in Brutal Companion. The quote from Matthew 5:4 was a way to set the tone for the collection—acknowledging the inevitability of mourning, of suffering, but also the hope that there’s some solace, some divine comfort to be found in the process. In poems like “The Crowning” and “On Knowing,” I’m grappling with the idea of faith in the face of overwhelming grief and the seeming randomness of life.
This is an intimate struggle. I have extant existential questions: why we suffer, why some lives are cut short, and whether there’s any greater meaning or design to it all. I often find myself grappling with the silence of the divine—how, in moments of great loss, God or faith can feel distant, even absent. At the same time, I find the divine in the everyday, in small acts of love or connections to people or nature. My poems reflect that tension: the desire for comfort and the persistent doubt that it will ever come.
JM: One of the last poems in the collection, “My Mother Is A Garden,” touches on your mother’s immigration and the “American zodiac dream.” The poem is lush and luminous yet hints at this rottedness under the fecundity, points at a rift between speaker and guardian but also between speaker and country. What is your perspective as a second-generation immigrant towards the America of your mother’s era versus present day? What rifts do you see juxtaposing these Americas?
RQ: As a second-generation immigrant, I have a unique perspective on the America my mother came to and the America now. For my mother, America represented opportunity, a chance to build a new life and escape the limitations of her environment. The American dream was full of promise, but that promise was not without its complications—it is a bait and switch game built to create the poor and working class. While America offered her a path to a better life, it also brought with it the experience of marginalization, of being an outsider in a country that didn’t always welcome her. This inspired my current poetry collection; it is about a cursed woman who is a flight attendant in the late twentieth century.
For me, the rift lies in how America’s ideals—freedom, opportunity, equality—often fail to live up to their reality. I see the contradictions in how this country values certain lives over others and how immigrant communities are often forced to assimilate or face exclusion. The luminosity of America’s promise, as represented in “My Mother Is A Garden,” is often undercut by a darker undercurrent—of systemic inequality, of the unfulfilled dreams of immigrants like my mother who worked hard but still faced barriers.
The America of my mother’s era reveals that while some progress has been made, struggle remains. The American dream is still elusive for many, especially for immigrants and marginalized communities. The tension between wanting to belong and the reality of exclusion continues to define the immigrant experience. This is the rift I see—between the vision of America as a land of opportunity and the ongoing reality of exclusion, both for my mother’s generation and my own.
JM: I think my favorite poems in this collection center on queer life and queer love, its divinity, its grace, its cosmic grandeur, such as “Aubade” and “Genesis,” and even its heartbreak, such as the grief of loss in “After the Flood.” For me, it is what binds many of the other complexities of the collection, and I kept thinking of it as a grounding, a return to self. Is this reflective of your own life? Tell me about your poetic experience writing about queer identity in this collection, how you balanced it with nature and where you feel these intersect, in particular against the traditional context of how queerness has been painted as against nature, or against biology.
RQ: Queer identity is central to my life and to Brutal Companion. I lived in Urbana-Champaign before moving to Chicago. I held a tenure track role in Central Illinois, but I needed to be around people like me. Sadly, the role didn’t accommodate the need. Not long after moving to Chicago, I knew I wanted to live my life here. I am trying to slow down to make a home with my partner and our puppy, Cruz. Tennessee Williams wrote “Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.” Writing about queer love, loss, and desire was a way for me to explore not just private experiences but how queerness interacts with larger themes of nature, divinity, and belonging.
In poems like “On Witness / For Paul Monette” and “Decomposition,” I wanted to elevate queer love to something celestial or atomic, something beyond constraints. There’s a sense of grace and grandeur in queer relationships that I feel isn’t always recognized or celebrated, and I wanted these poems to reflect that divinity. At the same time, I was mindful of how queerness has traditionally been painted as unnatural or against the order of things. In response to that, I chose to intertwine queer identity with the natural world—to show that queerness is as much a part of the natural world as anything else. I view queer love and queer bodies as connected to the cycles of life, death, and renewal that are inherent. These intersections allow me to explore the complexity of identity—how queerness is grounded in the physical world and transcendent of it, and how it exists in harmony with and in defiance of societal expectations. For me, writing about queer identity in Brutal Companion was about reclaiming that cosmic grandeur, about recognizing the divinity in our loves, our losses, and our lives. It was also about centering my experience—making queerness the foundation from which the collection emerges.
Ruben Quesada is an award-winning poet and editor. He edited the groundbreaking anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, winner of the Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. He has served as poetry editor for AGNI, Poet Lore, Pleiades, Tab Journal, and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.
Jael Montellano (she/they) is a Mexican-born writer, poet, and editor. Her work exploring otherness features in La Piccioletta Barca, ANMLY Lit, Tint Journal, Beyond Queer Words, Fauxmoir, The Selkie, the Columbia Journal, and more. She is the interviews editor at Hypertext Magazine, practices a variety of visual arts, and is currently learning Mandarin. Find her at jaelmontellano.com.