Houston poet turns harsh realities into verse
Leslie Contreras Schwartz doesn’t use words to smooth over life’s edges. Instead, she writes about the jagged parts directly: the struggle of difficult pregnancies, the trials and joys of motherhood, the horrors she saw in her students’ lives when she briefly taught fourth grade.
As the mother of three small children — ages 6, 4 and 1 — Contreras Schwartz doesn’t have much free time for quiet reflection. But somehow she has churned out a collection of clear, crisp poems that tangle directly with the stuff of life.
“I’m compelled to do this,” said Contreras Schwartz, 36, a Rice University graduate who grew up in northwest Houston. She and her family now live in Meyerland. “Sometimes I just have to hold onto a thought or a scrap of paper during carpool and wait until everyone goes to sleep. I have to use my time wisely.”
Contreras Schwartz will read from her collection, “Fuego,” on Friday at Brazos Bookstore, and she’ll fill in some of the stories behind the lines on the page.
“Most of the writing in the collection came about when I was on bed rest,” she said. Contreras Schwartz has an autoimmune disease that made her pregnancies difficult, and before two of her children were born she was confined to bed rest for months at a time. “I was trying to do what I could just to get through it, so I wrote a lot.”
Those long, painful weeks of waiting are recounted in several poems, including one titled “Bed Rest”: “I lay on one side or the other, on the couch / on the bed, on the living room floor, / on the restroom tiles, / on the hospital bed. / Veins and wires tangled, / my hair knotted into a perpetual, / spectacular point like an electric eel.”
Elsewhere in “Fuego,” Contreras Schwartz focuses on her short-lived teaching career; for less than a year, she struggled to teach fourth-graders at a school in southwest Houston.
A poem called “School Dismissal, January 21, 2014” recounts the day her students saw a woman dead on the sidewalk across the street from the school. Contreras Schwartz recalls her students lined up outside the school, looking at the body: “Her open hand, palm to the pale sky / after the man shot her in the head. / This is what the children stared / at, this hand, still, fingers curled …”
Her lines are spare, her poems short. Contreras Schwartz wastes no words overexplaining.
“I used to over-write,” she said. “That is my tendency. But I’ve learned to let silence speak as much as the words that I write.”
She has, however, fleshed out some of these experiences in essays published across the Web, from the Chronicle to the Huffington Post. Personal essays make her feel “more exposed,” she said, spilling the details of her life. In poetry, though, she can make that experience universal and “try to create some connection with other people.”
In her next project, Contreras Schwartz wants to address human trafficking. “I think for me, there’s a link between writing and activism,” she said. “I think that there is a moral purpose to writing, even if it’s just to broaden someone’s experience.”