What is Obscuro Beach?
Obscuro Beach is a place of Strange sightings & Poetical phenomena. A place of recurring dreams & childhood fantasies. An obscure place. A bizarro kind of place. It is born of the childhood beaches where I played out with my siblings elaborate and thrilling games of mystery, murder, and horrific wonderment—the unfolding shores of Manzanita, Cannon beach, Neah Bay. It's the tide of washed up things. Where la llorona floats along the edge of the mist at the hour of sleep. Where sorrow festers amorphously (and amorously), crowned by flies and gulls. It's a place where mystery and magic are allowed to dwell and deepen and Be. It is always & never, not-quite-here and yet—it's here, it's right where we are. It's the strange place within.
—SAS
Obscuro Beach is a place of Strange sightings & Poetical phenomena. A place of recurring dreams & childhood fantasies. An obscure place. A bizarro kind of place. It is born of the childhood beaches where I played out with my siblings elaborate and thrilling games of mystery, murder, and horrific wonderment—the unfolding shores of Manzanita, Cannon beach, Neah Bay. It's the tide of washed up things. Where la llorona floats along the edge of the mist at the hour of sleep. Where sorrow festers amorphously (and amorously), crowned by flies and gulls. It's a place where mystery and magic are allowed to dwell and deepen and Be. It is always & never, not-quite-here and yet—it's here, it's right where we are. It's the strange place within.
—SAS
Photo by Intisar Abioto
STEPHANIE ADAMS-SANTOS is a Guatemalan-American writer from Portland, OR. Her full-length poetry collection, Swarm Queen’s Crown (Fathom Books 2016) was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, which celebrates excellence in LGBTQ voices. She is the author of several chapbooks of poetry, including Total Memory (Finishing Line Press 2016), and the award-winning chapbook The Sundering (Poetry Society of America 2009), selected for a New York Chapbook Fellowship. Stephanie has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and she was a finalist for the Corporeal Voices “THE VOICE IS A MUSCLE” Fellowship for writers of color. Her work has appeared in many print and online journals and magazines, including Guernica, The Boston Review, Orion Magazine and others. Stephanie has been awarded fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Film Independent.
Stephanie earned an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a BA in English at Stanford University. She is the founder of Tarot Obscuro and Ojo de la Selva Press. She teaches poetry workshops at the Independent Publishing Resource Center and Literary Arts.
Stephanie earned an MFA in Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a BA in English at Stanford University. She is the founder of Tarot Obscuro and Ojo de la Selva Press. She teaches poetry workshops at the Independent Publishing Resource Center and Literary Arts.
Stephanie’s work is rooted in the crossroads of ritual, ancestry, identity, and environment. Her work “invokes history as a knowledge that can be felt, something with the potential to transform (and transform our perspectives) at the intersections of language and image, intimacy and violence, and grief and galvanization” (Lo Kwa Mei-En). When guest editor Joanna Klink featured Stephanie’s poems on West Branch Wired, she described the work in her introduction as having “energies of fierce need, searching and self-possession”, work that “peers deeply and thoughtfully into pain.” She says: “Adams is heir to Roethke…There is a distinct, composed wildness in her voice. She is preoccupied with solitude and its effects on the body, and you can find her, in poems, scouring a landscape for what lives there, then reaching into it.”
