While working on an MFA in Nature Writing, Kira Córdova spent a year editing poems written over a period of 40 years by her grandmother, lifelong poet Carma Lucatero. The dream of publishing Carma’s poetry became a family endeavor with the help of Kira’s father as well as a cousin, artist Sophie Horan, who created cover art and illustrations. The end result was the release of Carma: How It Is (May 2025), a collection of poems that invites readers on a journey of self-discovery and reflection. Visit Kira on her website KiraRambles.com as well as on Bluesky, Instagram, and Substack.
What do you hope to accomplish by sending Carma: How It Is into the world?
By sending Carma: How It Is into the world, we hope to share Carma Lucatero’s poetry with readers publically for the first time. In the decades Carma has written poetry, she’s survived moving and losing hundreds of her poems (multiple times), the death of a child, and the disappearance of a husband, all while raising five children and helping raise her grandchildren. She hasn’t had time to submit. Living in rural areas and often working multiple jobs to make ends meet, she’s also faced barriers to getting involved in literary communities that could have helped her polish and submit her work. Carma: How It Is is the first time any of her poems will have been published.
When did you realize you wanted to publish your grandmother’s poetry? What was the kick in the pants to start the project?
My father has always wanted to help his mother publish a book. She’d dreamed and spoken about her first book for decades, and when I enrolled in an MFA program last year, we decided his experience as a reference librarian and mine as a writer would set us up for success. My cousin, Sophie Horan, who illustrated the book, also graduated from art school this May, and we wanted her to be able to list the book in her portfolio.
What was the greatest challenge in editing the book?
The greatest challenge was agreeing on a name. The final poem in the book reflects on how my grandmother has always wanted her poetry collection to be titled “Carma, with some revisal.” My father first proposed “Carma Makes Peace with the Past,” and Carma countered with “Carma: Along the Way,” but since Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez beat us to that title, we settled on Carma: How It Is.
Why are the poems arranged in their particular order?
The order of the poems is autobiographical. Carma was born in Ohio and moved to Southern Colorado as a young adult, so the first poems chronicle feeling out of place in the midwest and her long-time goal of moving to the mountains. The next poems are about the challenges she faced as an adult in Colorado and the Sierra Nevadas, and the book ends with poems reflecting on aging, her life, and her poetry.
Tell us about the journey to publication.
We started working on Carma: How It Is in the spring of 2024. My father visited his mother in Oklahoma, where she now lives with her youngest son, and she gave him several handwritten notebooks with poems she wanted in the book. We then transcribed them (the spelling and punctuation are faithful to her final, handwritten versions) and commissioned illustrations and cover art from my cousin and started the process of negotiating the title. We started working with a printer in Denver this winter and were able to get my cousin her comp copies by her graduation from art school.
What do you love about your grandmother’s poetry, and how do you characterize it? What has her poetry taught you about her?
Since I was little, reading Carma’s poetry has felt like a testament to her positivity and survival. She wrote my favorite poem in Carma: How It Is about how ladies have to climb mountains and cannot go around after surviving two abusive marriages. In another poem at the end, she reflects on how her life’s work is her poems and her family, and she’s grateful she has children and grandchildren to read her book. I am always amazed at the resilience and strength her poetry projects, especially considering what she went through writing it. I believe the positivity and dreams for the future she channels into her poems are the reason she’s made it through. Her poetry is free verse, often rhyming, and deeply accessible. It’s feel-good, but not out of naivety—out of the opposite.
What was the most rewarding aspect of putting this project together?
The most rewarding part of pulling this book together was getting to see my grandmother holding her first published book of poetry! As her life-long dream, it was soul-filling to be able to facilitate that.
Did editing or reading your grandmother’s poems affect how you look at other poetry?
Editing Carma: How It Is while working on my MFA in Nature Writing, which includes creative nonfiction and eco-poetry, was a great reminder to not let publication and current trends be the only forces driving my own writing. Because of its end rhyme and spelling, I suspect a lot of journals would not publish Carma’s poetry today, but that’s not why she wrote it. She writes poems as a way to express herself and her experiences and chooses the forms and rhyme schemes that feel most appropriate to her and what she writes about, not the ones that are most popular in lit mags. Poetry has never been the most profitable art form, and editing my grandmother’s writing while simultaneously studying the most recent, mostly popular poetry to try and publish my own makes me appreciate her sincerity and art all the more.
Does your grandmother have a message or a theme that recurs in her poems?
The West and the mountains have always been recurring themes in Carma’s poetry. They stand for her desire for independence and resilience in the face of obstacles, and as a long-time resident of both the Sierra Nevadas and the San Luis Valley from when she was 18 until her seventies, they are also the backdrop of most of her poems.
KL Wagoner loves creating worlds of fantasy and science fiction. Her current work in progress is The Last Bonekeeper fantasy trilogy and short stories in the same universe. A member of SouthWest Writers since 2006, Kat has worked as the organization’s secretary, newsletter editor, website manager, and author interview coordinator. Kat is also a veteran, a martial art student, and a grandmother. Visit her at klwagoner.com.
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