About Jane / La Segua

This project reinvents two colonial myths rooted in racism and class from Costa Rica. The legends of La Segua and Los Cadejos were created to discourage early settlers from racial mixing. La Segua is a cursed woman, and Los Cadejos are ghosts or spirits attributed to following some people to scare or kidnap them.

This collection reimagines the myth. Now set in the late 20th century, this collection follows a woman named Jane, a flight attendant. We meet Jane throughout her life. These poems are fablelike in their manner and style to reveal layers of harassment and abuse to comment on the legacy of the 1950s oppression of women in the United States and what it meant for women to re-enter the workforce decades after. This is a morality tale about desire and fate.

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by Ruben Quesada

Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems. His writing appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kirkus Review, and Harvard Review. He has served as an editor for AGNI, PANK, The Rumpus, and Pleiades and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles and for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.