Pan de Alma

Marcella Prokop

Pan de Alma is a reclamation of identity and heritage.

In this award-winning chapbook, Colombian-American Marcella Prokop navigates the streets of Bogotá, Cartagena and other cities, exploring the complexities of cultural and personal identity.

In “Hunger,” she confronts privilege by examining desire and dependence (Moonlight sugars our pale skin/ And I know again, in new ways/ the freedom and fullness/ of my young, foreign body”). In “Omayra’s Eyes,” she views the vastness of the universe through the eyes of a dying child (“Look into those eyes/and know what it is to endure/as if the soul were a penny/searching the depths for a peaceful bottom”). 

Whether she’s contemplating her experience as a tourist or wondering what it means that “Colombians are Americans, too,” Prokop celebrates abundance and agency in the face of absence and expectation, exploring connections to place and people across time and space. The poems in this collection layer language and myth and “national sabor” to set a resplendent table for readers hungry to know Prokop’s heartland as more than a country of imperial intervention and violence.

The manuscript earned second place in the Southern Collective Experience LatinX Poetry Contest.

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  • “In Pan de Alma, Marcella Prokop interrogates how spirit tethers not only to body but to place. In these poems, the hyphenated identity offers “victory and loss,” “promise and purgatory,” and also a visceral sharpening of the senses. Prokop’s Colombia haunts, her questions and imagery persisting long after the last page.”

    Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, author of Songs for the Land-Bound

  • The poems in Marcella Prokop's debut chapbook, Pan de Alma are full of hunger: Hunger for mondongo, guanabana, pan de queso; hunger for truth, for justice, for a lens trained on the kaleidoscope of images that unfurl on every page; Hunger to nourish, hunger to feed, hunger to provide the reader with just the sustenance they need to come away full.

    Caridad Moro-Gronlier, poet laureate of Miami-Dade County and auther of Tortillera

  • “Pan de Alma is a celebration of ancestry, identity, and the spiritual communion between place and self. Each poem is both an offering and a revelation, grounded in Prokop’s Colombian inheritance.

    Ruben Quesada, editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry and Brutal Companion.

“Pan de Alma is a celebration of ancestry, identity, and the spiritual communion between place and self. Each poem is both an offering and a revelation, grounded in Prokop’s Colombian inheritance. “Bursting with impermanence” and clarity of vision from “the chipped bowls / from abuelita’s kitchen” or staring into “Omayra’s eyes,” which bear “the vacuum of collapsed stars / and Colombia’s shifting soil.” These lines, like so many, echo with generations of sacrifice and quiet persistence. What emerges is a reckoning and reverent embrace of “the in-between of existence, / the hyphen, the middle” that is “both victory and loss.” It’s this liminality that becomes Prokop’s most compelling element, as she writes “a communion of the US and Colombia” in glowing, spiritual language that is at once intimate and political. Pan de Alma is a vessel filled with memory, faith, and hard-won love.

Ruben Quesada, author of Revelations (2018), Next Extinct Mammal (2011), the award-winning, landmark anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (2023), and Brutal Companion (2024).