Between Pleasure and Pain

L. A. Johnson interviews Eduardo Martínez-Leyva about his debut poetry collection, “Cowboy Park.”

By L. A. JohnsonJanuary 31, 2025

• Poetry

EDUARDO MARTÍNEZ-LEYVA AND I met on our first day at Columbia’s MFA program. We shared teachers, poems, and life, and began what I think of now as an unending conversation. In the more than 10 years since we met, I’ve watched Martínez-Leyva create and shape the poems that make up Cowboy Park (2024), his debut book of poetry. Though he labored on this book that whole time, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts, allowed all that hard work to crack open—for the book to finally come to fruition. The book looks different from what he and I first discussed all those years ago, having expanded to encompass his adult experiences and his family history in his hometown of El Paso, Texas. These poems detail a brother’s deportation, a mother’s survival of a hate crime mass shooting, and the speaker’s own sexual and personal awakening.

On a Saturday morning, from New York and Los Angeles, Martínez-Leyva and I met over Zoom to discuss poetic craft, the impact of hometowns, and what went into the coalescence of his debut collection.

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L. A. JOHNSON: Tell me about your book’s dedication to your mom, your grandmother, and Lucie Brock-Broido.

EDUARDO MARTÍNEZ-LEYVA: Well, these women are my trifecta—my grandmother was one of the first people I told I wanted to be a writer. Everyone in my family thought it was crazy because there’s no money in that, which is true, but I remember I was in middle school; I liked to write and do creative things. She said, “Well, maybe when you write a book, you can include something about me.” So, it was always my goal—she had to be there. My mom, obviously, because of the experiences, and Lucie, in some ways, was like that maternal figure for poetry when we got to our MFA. That’s the holy trinity of individuals who inspired the poems. My grandmother passed away in 2003, so she never got to see it, but she encouraged me because in my culture, we don’t do a lot of creative stuff, especially as boys. She would give me [opportunities] to be creative, where my mom was kind of the opposite—especially with my brothers.

Which is the oldest poem in the book, and how did the book begin? How did it come together over the next decade?

I felt disconnected from most of the poems that I wrote during grad school or for my thesis manuscript. I wrote a few—“Learning the Language” being one of them—and I thought, “This is what I want to say.” Everything else felt very forced, so that one generated everything. I then had a good solid chunk of poems, and then that’s when I started to apply to the Fine Arts Work Center using those poems. I kept getting close to being accepted, and then eventually, when I was about to give up, I got accepted. And then there, I actually had time to think about the 10 poems that I had. The last poem of the book was actually the first poem that I wrote when I was in Provincetown, and I actually wrote it on the bus to get there. So, the first poem in the collection is one of the earliest ones, and the last one in the book was sort of the second entry into going back to the manuscript.

How did being in Provincetown help you write the poems?

The poems in what eventually became the middle section of the manuscript—the edgier ones—were written during my time in Provincetown precisely because it was a bit more liberating and an environment that felt vastly different from the Southwest life in El Paso in multiple ways: the landscape, the weather, the docks, the drag queens, the Puritan tours, the dunes, the nightlife. Seeing this environment allowed me to throw caution to the wind, feel less self-conscious about what I wrote, and just dive in. The contrast between its traditional daytime atmosphere and its vibrant, uninhibited nightlife was liberating for me. This dichotomy inspired my exploration of themes like the boundary between pleasure and pain. Provincetown’s creative community sparked new ideas and shaped the progression of my work.

The framing of the book is investigating your hometown of El Paso, and its role as a border city. What was it like being a queer man growing up there—the opposite of Provincetown?

It was challenging. On the one hand, I love the community that fostered me, but on the other hand, there were moments when I couldn’t wholeheartedly be myself. So, I very much stayed closeted. In my household, there were strong opinions about folks who were part of the LGBTQ+ community, and those opinions were not the kindest. The environment is rooted in traditions, religion, and heteronormativity. Being in Provincetown, kind of out in the open, affirmed my queerness, whereas for most of my life, I had to act differently, play a role. I think it still stays with me even into adulthood—the idea that you can be one person in public but then in the dark, in private, like in a place that’s not well known or well visited, you can then be your authentic self.

I’m curious about the influence of your older brothers on the work. You decided to use this composite brother figure of Angelo. Can you say more about why? Because Angelo seems to borrow from all the brothers: for example, the experience of your brother being deported becomes one element of Angelo’s story.

From my brothers, I learned several lessons. On the one hand, I learned how to stand up for myself. However, it was difficult growing up because I was closeted. Moreover, I could see the faults in them—the vices that gripped them—and the toxic masculinity. Yes, Angelo is a composite, borrowing tidbits from all my siblings, and it was a way for me to remove or create permission to tell some of the stories from my upbringing in a way that doesn’t feel too confessional, because some of the memories are accurate, but I also took liberties with the character. Angelo became the vehicle for all these experiences but also for me to write about my brother’s deportation. I felt that Angelo was the missing puzzle piece—he became a good conduit to tell that story, which was very difficult.

Even the story of my mom and of her surviving the mass shooting in El Paso—that was also something that I was struggling with because it’s one of those things where I thought, “Well, can I even write about this because it didn’t happen to me?” And there wasn’t an Angelo, but because I set the ground rules with Angelo, I think the story of my mom can kind of exist in that same realm.

At what point in the process did the structure of the manuscript take place?

It was actually maybe a year ago when I talked to you on Zoom, because we had gone over poems and then you told me, “You should just organize it and see what happens.” I literally just went, “Oh, well, that!” And then also, Phillip B. Williams told me that I was being too controlling with what I wanted in the sections, the original sections. And he was like, “You need to let loose and see what happens.” So, taking those two bits of advice, I did what everyone does—I put them down on the floor, and then I started to look at which poems felt like they were in conversation. Then I created those sections, but that left out a lot of the poems about my mom. I remember there was a pile of them after I had structured everything, and I was like, “I don’t know where these fit in.” I think part of it is that I’m still trying to figure out if it’s okay to write about.

I was trying to explain how the poems depict a family or community that has endured different types of oppression. I would like folks to see these figures that have been impacted in some way by societal structures. But nevertheless, there’s still heart, there’s beauty, and there’s strength there, despite those flaws. And I think that’s also my way of giving myself permission to depict the flaws in order to also show a little bit of their resilience. In the book, there’s the brother that was deported; the mother had to endure a shooting, but it’s all a result of society often pushing these types of individuals to the margins. Ultimately, I wanted to make the book about how we can still survive, given all of this.

That relates to a question I had: I was interested in the points of view in the book because one of the things I noticed was that a lot of the poems are from the perspective of a “we” or a whole. There’s also a number in the second person.

I wrote a lot of those when I was in Provincetown, so there was this idea of me being this disembodied self looking at what was happening. So that’s why “you” are doing this, similar to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), but obviously not in those same situations.

What do you feel is the relationship between beauty and violence in the creation of the poems? Because there’s a lot of violent things described beautifully, and then there are innocuous things described dangerously, such as the dangerous lipstick.

Similar to what I mentioned earlier, in El Paso, I experienced a stark juxtaposition of beauty and violence. The constant presence of Border Patrol disrupted daily life, yet there was a sense of harmony within the chaos. This environment, marked by privilege on one side and harsh realities on the other, influenced my exploration of these extremes. The violence, particularly against women, was a recurring disruption to normalcy and deeply impacted my perspective. Growing up, there was significant violence, especially against women, with many going missing, including two girls from my high school who were murdered. These violent interruptions shattered any semblance of normalcy. So the exploration stems from these contrasts: the community that is resilient but also the violence that was imposed upon others. Because the border is a militarized place.

I’d like to hear your thoughts related to the difference between dirt and filth.

Dirt, to me, is where life grows—it’s natural and beautiful. But then there’s that aspect of being shoved in the dirt. I’m thinking of the Mexican adage: “Anything that touches the ground now belongs to the devil.” So there’s this idea of trying to be pristine. Dirt became filthy because others made it seem that way. But to me, sometimes, the dirt was the place of play.

And the idea of filth, to me, is almost like something imposed by others, but often in the gay community. If I were to read a poem about a harness, people would sort of clutch their pearls, even though they were doing similar things. So I always felt it was interesting that talking about it made me filthy in others’ eyes, but I didn’t necessarily feel filthy.

I’m curious about how you feel the use of sentence fragments alters the lyric mode of the poems.

I see fragments as defiance, moving away from conventional grammar, those expectations, and playing around with it. ​​In some poems, the fragments give a sense of urgency, almost like a thought that comes quickly but gets somewhat disrupted. I wanted the reader to pause—asking readers to pause almost like in a line break. I wanted the reader to focus on the image or idea the line is conveying. So, I felt like a period would really cause folks to pause, even though it might not be grammatically correct. Also, the speaker, who speaks English as a second language, is trying to communicate, so the speaker might not always be using the right mechanics. And I think it also goes back to this idea of control over the way things look—a little bit more symmetrical to a certain extent. I feel like the violence or the content kind of pushes against that neatness.

What is the role of cowboys in the book?

Again, inspired by the Southwest’s landscape, the cowboys in the book symbolize masculinity and its complexities, including its homoerotic aspects in gay culture. The title comes from [El Paso’s] Cowboy Park, a place of both childhood fun and hidden dangers. Cowboys also reflect the violent, masculine culture I saw growing up, influenced by country music and Mexican traditions. They embody everything I wanted to explore in my poetry. I kept thinking about what I saw growing up, and the cowboy captures that. It does feel like it’s all of the above, everything that I wanted my poetry to say.

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Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, along with a teaching fellowship from Columbia University, where he earned his MFA. He was the writer-in-residence at St. Albans School for Boys in Washington, DC, and teaches and resides in New York City.