Born and raised in Ohio, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood moved to the South over two decades ago and has also lived and traveled in her mother's native country of Mexico. She writes about all of these places in her debut poetry collection, TROUBLE CAN BE SO BEAUTIFUL AT THE BEGINNING, using their landscape and culture as a backdrop and a contrast to consider her identity and what it means to migrate from one location to another, how a place's values and societal expectations can shape who you are and who you become, and how you can be both a part of something and apart from it. The theme of migration also widens out to include the shift from one reality to another as well as from one perspective to another. Many of these poems interrogate memories, some that are inherited, some that are secret, some that are supposed, and find meaning in them, and at times, truth. Cawood uses autobiography and imagination in her poems to consider what it means to be young, to fall in and out of love, to break and become whole again, to face tragedy and fear and come out weaker or stronger, to struggle with power, and to let go of those we love not because of lack of feeling but because of earned wisdom. TROUBLE CAN BE SO BEAUTIFUL AT THE BEGINNING tells stories about what it means to uncover truths about oneself, about the people we love, and about the people we come from.
