In 2017, María Gómez Lara had a brain tumor removed which was dangerously close to the place where language inhabit in the brain. The Place Where Words Reside is about that experience- about the physical and emotional terror the body feels after a medical diagnosis and through treatment, but also about her vital relationship to language itself, the expression of the symbiotic bond between the physical and linguistic. In an early poem, Gómez Lara writes: "your thing was to save yourself with words." Then she forces herself to speak, to "tell your brain repeat it repeat it/ please don't get sick." Here, language is a fragile body, fragile because it too can become inflamed and infirmed, because it can break. And also because language is its own curative. Curtis Bauer