Ana Carrete is the author of Baby Babe, make-believe love-making, Sadmess, why-fi, and naíf y kawaii.
Carrete’s book of poetry and drawings, Baby babe, published in 2012 by the boundary-pushing press Civil Coping Mechanisms, is as light as it is dark. HTML Giant wrote of the collection: “What’s most touching to me is that her humor remains, the playfulness, and the strut, and the sticking out her tongue. What I love most about Ana is her great laugh before sadness and the beauty of her thinking and being.”
Her poetry published online achieves the same:
why do you always wear makeup?
maybe because my best friend and her friends
put makeup on my face once when i was fourteen years old
and then they said something like
she doesn’t look ugly anymore or
she doesn’t look that ugly
and when i looked at myself in the mirror
my eyes were the smokiest
and all the smog was in my mouth(from Ana Carrete’s “why do you always wear makeup?” in Shabby Doll House)
Her poetry is dark, often sad, and hints at a shroud of self-preservation. Her author bio even mentions that her social media accounts are private. But she is no stranger to getting her work out there: with a handful of collections under her belt, she also prints her own books and zines and teaches others how to do the same.
Carrete reads in San Diego on Friday, July 27th at LAST EXIT, alongside Chelsea Hodson, Melissa Broder, and Suzy Fincham-Gray. 8 PM at Sash (3753 Sixth Ave in Hillcrest).
(Here’s the event on Facebook)
last exit 