The Sensual Poetry of Stephanie Laterza
- Elizabeth Gracen
- 6 minutes ago
- 7 min read
By Elizabeth Gracen:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café continues to feature the work of poets from around the globe. It is an honor to share their work and learn more about their lives, influences, and love of poetry.
This week, we are honored to feature the work of poet Stephanie Laterza.
Stephanie Laterza is an Italian Ecuadorian-American author and attorney. Her books, The Lunasole Class (Alien Buddha Press, 2024) and The Boulevard Trial, were honored as finalists of the 2025 American Legacy Book Awards in the categories of LGBTQ+ Fiction and Thriller: Legal, respectively. Stephanie is also the author of the social justice–focused poetry collection Verás (Broadstone Books, 2023) and the erotic feminist poetry chapbook The Psyche Trials (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Follow Stephanie on IG @stef3rd.
I reached out to Stephanie to talk about her work, passions and powerful poetry.
Please meet Stephanie Laterza!
EG: Stephanie, thank you so much for submitting your poetry to the site. Your work amazes me with its sensuality, raw honesty, and powerful wordplay—just beautiful. Please tell our readers a bit about you and how and when you decided to become a lawyer, writer, and poet.
Stephanie Laterza: Thank you so much for your generous and supportive response to my poetry, Elizabeth! I always appreciate when my work resonates with editors and readers—an experience which inspires me, against the pull of self-doubt and the thrum of everyday responsibilities, to keep finding time to write! A bit about me, I’m an Italian-Ecuadorian-American writer and remote attorney based in Brooklyn, NY. I live in Bed Stuy with my wonderful German husband and our brilliant, sweet teen son. I’ve written poetry since childhood and earned my B.A. in English from Fordham College at Lincoln Center as well as a J.D. from New England Law School in Boston. I decided to become an attorney after college and worked as a paralegal for a couple of years. Along the way, I never stopped writing creatively!
EG: There is such an earthy essence to the poems that you’ve shared for this article—such a wry perspective that cuts right to the heart of what you perceive and feel. I have not had the opportunity to read any of your books, but I’m curious about your work as an attorney working in the field of social justice. Your poem “Two Boats” gives me a clue, but I’d love for you to elaborate. How do art and law entwine to inform the work you do, both as a lawyer and artist?
SL: Thanks so much again! Although my remote attorney work actually focuses on corporate litigation rather than social justice, my law school coursework in Constitutional Law has definitely impacted and informed my writing. In my social justice–focused poetry collection Verás (Broadstone Books), for example, I champion women’s rights, confront systemic racism, and promote gun control. As the mother of a teen son, I firmly believe that compassion is vital to combatting all forms of discrimination in our society. In Spanish, “Verás” means “you’ll see,” so my book tentatively looks with hope towards a better future.
In college, some of my early poems were published in Fordham Lincoln Center's literary magazine, Red Rover, and during my first year of law school, my first online poems were published in Meniscus Magazine. During my third year of law school, a remarkable seminar in Law and Literature focused on the numerous definitions of the word "trial," a fact which later inspired the titles and themes in my feminist erotic poetry chapbook The Psyche Trials (Finishing Line Press) and my feminist legal thriller The Boulevard Trial. Despite their obvious differences, the fields of law and literature share an emphasis on linguistic precision, rhetorical prowess, and, yes, creativity.
EG: The poetry featured in this article speaks loudly from the feminine perspective, but the work truly resonates with a keen curiosity about life and what it means to be human in this crazy world. When it comes to poetry in particular, how does the muse find you? If you’re comfortable talking about “process,” please share a bit about how you like to work.
SL: The muse visits me all the time, and I’ve filled myriad notebooks and scraps of paper with my sudden observations, insights, and metaphors while simultaneously adding to an evolving structure for each literary work I create. Then it’s drafting, editing, and redrafting. I’ve come to believe that narrative often dictates structure, so I know which of my ideas is best expressed as a poem, a short story, or a novel based on what I’m trying to say and my intended audience. I've also recently undertaken screenwriting and TV writing online, so we'll see how those writing forms work out for me in the future!
EG: Talk to me about your influences—across the board. Poets, music, literature, films, etc. What has and continues to inspire you to write and create poetry?
SL: Wow, there are so many to list, but I’ll name a few! In the realm of poetry, I am enamored of the work of Ada Limón, Lucille Clifton, Maggie Smith, Ocean Vuong, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. H. Auden, and the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi. Some of my favorite novelists include Jhumpa Lahiri, Nella Larsen, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, Milan Kundera, Brit Bennett, Isabel Allende, and Crystal Hana Kim.
As I’m a lover of Rock en Español, I’ve been inspired by the music of Maná, Enanitos Verdes, early Shakira, and Natalia Lafourcade. Also, I’ll always have a tender spot in my heart for Norah Jones (circa 2004) and Leonard Cohen. With respect to influential Italian singers, I adore Lucio Battisti, Mina, Adriano Celentano, and Paolo Conte. I’m also an opera lover, and Puccini is my favorite composer.
In film, some particularly influential directors include Mira Nair, Michel Gondry, Celine Song, and, of course, Federico Fellini. I continue to write poetry (and novels, short stories, etc.) because of the urgency I feel to speak up about important social issues and, especially for the educated proletariat girls out there finding their way in the world like I did with little guidance while looking for love in all the wrong places, to impart some hard-earned wisdom. I’m all about dismantling the patriarchy while building sisterhood.
EG: Stephanie, thank you so much for sharing your life and work with Flapper Press. Please tell me about any exciting projects on the horizon and where our readers can find out more about you.
SL: The pleasure is mine! And thank you for publishing my poems in Flapper Press! Publication-wise, my poem, “Una Sola Verdad” dedicated to the memory of Jordan Neely, will be published in Anger is A Gift: Anthology of Resistance and Response Poems to the 2024 Election by Flowersong Press this May. I have a featured reading at Sunnyside Arts in Queens, NY on May 29th. I’m also looking forward to the NYC Poetry Festival this summer on Governors Island. I’d love for folks to follow me via my author blog and on Instagram @stef3rd.
Twentea
Twenty years this spring would have been now. April is when torrents come as often as we blew breath into each other’s mouths, drenched in bliss, all morsels of death, before becoming the other. In your bedroom you planted seeds, conjuring the waft of licorice, anise water Abuelita steeped in middle age. I understand the need for warm tonics to salve the pangs of memory, loss as filling as a cauldron of potato soup culminating in a milky bowl of sticky sweet hominy pearls staked with a stiff cinnamon branch, lodged in the entrails, forever. I recount myself the story of what it meant to have every inch of my limbs touched and looks read deftly as prints. I’ll never understand if you were an adoring lover or the cleverest draftsman ever to bear the rain in April, suspended in my lungs mixed with all the salt I’m worth, shedding skin, like cells. I’m recreated every seven years a new viper off Eve’s tongue, like Persephone’s seeds resurging red, swelling rubies like Rumi’s sunrise. You on my tongue are the rain, seaweed, every tea leaf I’ve read, salted shadows I’ve squeezed bloodshot, ever steeped in the Atlantic.
From the poet:
This is a nostalgic poem inspired by a past relationship with an engineer.
Mulberry Wine
This summer my arms still ache from treading blood-
stained puddles that gather on the tarp beneath mulberry
branches whose striae map more summers than my son
and I have been alive. But who knows what the harvest will
bring tomorrow or any day I drop him off at school and wave.
The challenge is to stay ahead of the rain that won’t relent
after days of wildfires in the North, ash replaces air
we breathe, and we never imagined it not being
fresh with petrichor. Instead, smoke creates clouds
that buckle beneath the weight of soot and spill water
as if from a decanter over mulberries that pelt the skull
when they fall. A fraction survives
assuming they don’t drown in pools of wine
that ferment before returning to the soil again and
thoughts and prayers are nothing
but a tarp lain across a patch of earth
cradling crimson mirrors, showing
the quiver of countless young leaves
waving back at an ochre sky.
From the Poet:
This poem was inspired by the Canadian wildfires that occurred a couple of summers ago, the mulberry tree in my backyard here in Brooklyn, and the horrific news reports of continued mass shootings in this country.
Two Boats
I tried reading Rilke in the crowded train car this morning but met the dizzying pendulum
swing of a woman’s white Chanel purse, the intertwined gold Cs at my eye level, as she leaned in to kiss, then kiss, then kiss her lover. I was already trying to avoid the man's meaty fingers curled around the neck of the pole. The throbbing behind my left eye worsened and I wondered if it was a looming stroke and about how many more years I intended to do my kind of work. I wanted to believe some new system would swallow the current so I would have to focus on my writing. I didn't want to end up like the former trial attorney on my team materializing whenever I tried to hide in the bathroom who declared, first all the weddings, then all the divorces. And what was the Tuscarora proverb that a person standing between two boats is bound to fall into the river. But what if the irreconcilable current is swallowed along with what if I.
From the Poet:
This poem is inspired by the perpetual challenge of balancing a law career and my passion for creative writing.
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