by Karen Sherk Chio
September 2, 2025
Flight Plan by M. Soledad Caballero; Red Hen Press, 2025; 103 pages; $17.95.
M. Soledad Caballero’s Flight Plan spans geographies both physical and psychological—from cells to continents, from quotidian to unusual, from grounded to soaring. Intertwining seemingly dissimilar topical threads that include cancer, a migrant heritage, a fascination with birds, history, and ghosts, Caballero’s astute second collection shines with authentic voice, luminous imagery, incisive language, and creative form as it deftly and honestly reflects on the liminality inherent in the experiences of flesh, family, faith, and flight.
Caballero establishes her speaker through the opening “Let Emptiness Be the Prize,” a poem endearing in its genuine frankness, a tone Caballero wields adroitly throughout the book. “I am grateful for this sagging, browning // empty body that cannot craft a zygote into a fetus,” the speaker states, openly unapologetic about “how my skin bunches around my stomach // from the years of cheese and wine.” We experience a speaker who will unabashedly tell the truth even, and especially, when it may not align with societal expectations of “a woman of a certain age.” This is a speaker who, throughout the manuscript, will describe the graphic dreadfulness of cancer treatment, question God and religion, candidly share phobias (of flying, of horses), reflect upon what may have been lost in her family’s migration, and admit to the challenge of crafting a poem. Flight Plan’s speaker accepts and leans into an imperfect existence, revealing for readers the relatable, practical, and wise perspective of a middle-aged woman, a demographic often dismissed, if not made invisible, within society.
Narrated from mid-life, the speaker’s corporeal experience threads through the collection to reflect on a body changed by aging, breast cancer, and weight gain. Elegiac at times, defiant at others, these poems demonstrate a range of emotional and visceral registers. In just nine blunt lines in “A Burning” the speaker describes the experience of radiation, “A world of burning / on a slab” and concludes “I forget I am not meat.” In “Chemotherapy,” the speaker lays bare the revulsive physicality of the treatment, likening it to being left with “a mash of sea creatures after / a storm” along the shore, decomposing in the sun. And in “Hepatology Appointment,” the speaker has an imagined response to her doctor who has chided her for a fat body, which the speaker finds more fatiguing than shameful. “You are a gray stone. But have you ever known / the way love lives in the warmth of bread,” our speaker wonders of the clinician. Having a body is brutal in Flight Plan, as it is invaded, prodded, criticized, poisoned, and judged, and yet Caballero cultivates a mature tenderness towards the fluctuating physical self through the speaker’s palpable personhood and perceptive interiority. Even if a reader cannot directly relate, the speaker’s experiences accessibly and tacitly evoke empathy, if not a sense of solidarity.
Flight Plan also meditates skillfully on the liminality of migration and its ripples within a family. Poems featuring the speaker’s mother, Abuelita, and homeland of Peru slide between English and untranslated, unitalicized Spanish, demonstrating the porousness of borders and bilingualism. In the poem “Myths We Tell,” three interconnected sonnets work through the speaker’s mother’s losses in immigrating to the United States, revealing a mother who “feels the way that Spanish is still exiled from / her mouth. She wonders, perdí la cordillera, perdí mi país por esto?” Caballero deftly lays bare the in-betweenness of the immigrant experience, describing how the speaker mocked her own mother’s accent, the ways her mother makes herself small “como un grano de arroz” in response to US current events. The collection’s longest and most ambitious poem, an ekphrastic pecha kucha after Peruvian abstract artist Fernando de Szyszlo, braids the Incan history of Atahualpa and Pizarro with the speaker’s family migration story. Across twenty vignettes each titled for de Szyszlo’s paintings, Caballero intertwines coastal and mountainous landscapes, ancient clashes and present-day contradictions, and faith and flight with a deft lyricism and figuration that creates a portrait of generational movement, continuing to the present with the speaker’s niece “still / unsure of the next migration.”
Flight is a dominant motif in the manuscript and bird imagery is abundant. In “Flying, A List,” airplane flight is a space in between states, literal and figurative. In “Writing Prompt,” the thrill of poetry is likened to a bird diving through the air and capturing its prey with sharp talons. In “I Continue my Love Affair,” birds fly overhead while a speaker drives, evoking a sudden feeling of wonder. Flight Plan is fascinated by all that soars, swoops, ascends, even hatches. This includes questions of faith, especially the Christian faith of the speaker’s family. Jesus is a ghost who “guides all the other lonely sad ghosts up the stairs or / the sky to heaven where ghosts have a place to lie down and sleep with / dogs and maybe some stars.” In “The Jesus I Could Know,” the Jesus the speaker could worship is human, social, doubting, “pissed off about poverty;" he “is like the bird wishing / to break out of the shell.” Caballero’s matter-of-fact voice aptly counters and grounds lofty and empyrean topics, creating an in-between: midair, mid-meal, mid-journey, mid-belief.
Flight Plan lyrically and nimbly probes the corporeal, familial, and flighted. Forthright and visceral, the manuscript migrates incisively through layered landscapes: bodily, geographic, linguistic, and generational. Unlike many collections, Flight Plan is not organized in sections; instead, its many themes and images weave through the collection’s one body to create a dynamic collage of mid-life. Flight Plan is a worthy read, especially for those grappling with the contradiction of physical losses and intellectual gains in middle age. Caballero shows us that while it’s been a journey to arrive where we are—carrying imperfect histories, in imperfect bodies, with imperfect beliefs and fears—we are, fortunately, only mid-flight.
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Midair in Mid-Life: Migration and Maturity in M. Soledad Caballero’s Flight Plan
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Andrej Lišakov from Unsplash+
Karen Sherk Chio (she/her) earned an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans, where she was the winner of the 2025 Andrea Saunders Gereighty/ Academy of American Poets Award, the 2025 Maxine and Joseph Cassin Prize for Poetry Thesis, and the 2023 Vassar Miller Poetry Award. She is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review, a full-time public health worker, a parent, and a spouse. Her creative work has appeared in swamp pink, Salamander, CALYX Journal, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and her critical work has been published by Colorado Review.
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