The poems in
Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana
are a call-and-response. Part translation, part conversation, and part footnote, this collection considers how desire and divinity are intimately acquainted. Tactically, the experience of it is akin to reading someone's private text messages; on one side July Westhale's translations of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. On the other, Westhale's response to them. There is something about both the process of translation and the process of coming into wholeness within queer desire that is akin: the seams of both show. Meaning is made through iteration, then reiteration. Through intimacy with, and intimacy without (other bodies, and people to translate them). At the end, what the reader has is a collection every bit as complex as how Sor Juana described her lovers: both "bedroom and bullring."