Coming Soon!
I am thrilled to announce that my debut poetry chapbook, What Color is the Soil in Cuba?, has been accepted for publication with Kelsay Books! Stay tuned for news about publication dates, book launches, readings, and other events.
What Color is the Soil in Cuba? explores heritage and the search for belonging through family lore, food, loss, and deep, tenacious love. When the old generation dies, who is left to tell the stories? Do the stories change? We examine the past with tenderness and rage, then write a new narrative.
What readers can expect:
- The complicated nature of love for family
- Longing for identity and belonging
- Grief and loss
- Humor and vulnerability
- Making peace with the past, then writing a new story
Additional (fun) takeaways:
- Tales of old Cuba
- Beloved recipes
- Celebrity cameos (Taylor Swift, Joni Mitchell, Disney’s Robin Hood, and more…)
- Random facts you may one day need at trivia night
- Weird Girl vibes
Endorsements for What Color is the Soil in Cuba?
Socarras Ferrell writes fresh work that burns with sensory particularity. What Color is the Soil in Cuba erases the innocence of childhood into one of “salt-drained eyes” responsibility. Heritage has a way of seeping into your everyday, the sweetness in your cafecito, the bite of ropa vieja. In her work, Socarras Ferrell mixes comfort with the uncanny. You will leave this collection with both “scores notched in bones” and “tender whispering phantoms.”
– Miriam Calleja, author of Come Closer, I Don’t Mind the Silence
What we put into a recipe is just as important as what we leave out. This is also true for a poetry book. In this compelling collection, the poet is expert at erasure and inclusion. The theme of family and heritage and cuisine and roots are blended together with perfection. In each page, one will discover the delicacy of tangerines, rum and sugarcane and a hint of cayenne. The poems here bring a new understanding as to why the “fabric will never again rest in the same folds” after loss. This work leads us to “pause at the edge of the world” and look to “tiny cocoons incubating old moons.”
– Connie Post, author of Prime Meridian and Between Twilight
In Cathy Socarras Ferrell’s ambitious collection What Color is the Soil in Cuba?, poems of grief and loss intermingle with poems of hope and love. “It’s easy to mistake faded pangs for peace,” Ferrell writes, in the poem “What Kind of Mother?” These whip smart poems hold both the pain and the wisdom gleaned from the past and take direction from what was; the past, in Ferrell’s deft hands, is a place from whence language is summoned to enlarge the present; indeed, as Ferrell writes, “The tilted world has dilated.” Ferrell traces the landscape of heritage, birth order, and geography in these poems, showing that while these things are predetermined for each of us, we have language available, beckoning us to write a new story. “You never leave without looking me in the eye/I’ll take that too,” Ferrell writes in “I finally get a morning with you.” It’s a delight to listen to a voice that is clear-eyed, assured, and true; these poems nudge me into the direction of hope, and I’ll take that all day long.
– Kristie Frederick Daugherty, author of Hits Different: Poems Not by Taylor Swift and editor of Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift
In Cathy Socarras Ferrell’s poetry debut What Color is the Soil in Cuba? readers don’t receive an answer from “the kind of Hispanic, not really bilingual girl.” Because for those disconnected from their heritage, there is an unending questioning of the colors and soil and country described by ancestors, by those who never left, who’d never dream of returning, and who lost those connections after generations became soil themselves. This complex ache is “tendons and memory / an empty paper cup.” A cup the speaker spends her entire life trying to fill by being the granddaughter who “can still roll [her] rrs,” eldest daughter who “picks up pebbles and nervous habits,” mother harboring “tender whispering phantoms,” and lover “morning-breath-scented.” Distinct in imagery, vulnerable in voice, and playful in form, Socarras Ferrell can turn anything—a recipe book, a phone call with a beloved sister, a childhood Christmas list, a frog’s bones—into an existentialist poem that leaves readers ‘uncovered, tender, cracked open.’”
– S. Salazar, author of Raíces, Relics, and Other Ghosts
Cathy Socarras Ferrell’s What Color is the Soil in Cuba? is a tender, funny, formally inventive chapbook about family and the complicated ache of belonging. These poems move between old Cuba and the present moment, between recipes and memory, between what is passed down and what must finally be put down. Ferrell’s work is marvelous: sharp, vulnerable, surprising, and absolutely alive with emotional intelligence. Through erasure, strikeout poems, humor, and pop culture references (even Joni Mitchell, Taylor Swift, and a Barbie Dreamhouse make appearances), What Color is the Soil in Cuba? is filled with moments of lyric beauty. Ferrell has created a chapbook that feels both deeply intimate and wildly original. With lines like “I’ll hand you a wrinkled / button-down, step into a haze of atomized rose,” “In Cuba, we had evenings to dance in our frills,” “Can I be my own big sister?” and “I will love / your bruises / the scrapes on your elbows / your words uttered in red haste,” Ferrell’s poems shimmer with truth and tenderness. This chapbook will teach you how to say no, how to unfriend, and that “Grief is a Hungry Cannibal.” It is a love letter with teeth and a gorgeous reminder that sometimes the most powerful story is the one we finally learn to tell ourselves. I absolutely recommend you read these stunning and thoroughly engaging poems.
– Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, 2026)