The Five Stages of Stuttering is a poetic exploration of the connection between stuttering and grief. Stuttering is a fluency disorder. It is an interruption of the flow of speaking. A verbal paralysis. "I had to start where-where-where I left off," Cassie Holguin-Pettinato writes. The emotional pain of her words is exacerbated with every repetition. Her poems about family estrangement, chronic pain, divorce, postpartum depression, and unspoken traumas are interrupted with blockages and interjections. What if poetry itself is a form of disfluency commonly referred to as stuttering? "I couldn't speak the language of my mother. And so I hid the sacred clown in me." Stuttering is a form of disconnection from the original tongue. Snippets of a foreign language become bullets in times of war. Holguin-Pettinato's poetry is deeply rooted in place yet simultaneously estranged from it. "There is no grave to visit the living/Here." The poet needs to go through all the stages of grief-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance-before she can finally begin to find her voice. "I want [ ] peace," Cassie Holguin-Pettinato writes. "Sadness is on me for a little while." The final stage of grief and stuttering is acceptance and revision. And then the poetry begins.
Victory is often bittersweet in this collection by renowned author David Bowles. Whether through brujería on the Texas-Mexico borderlands, hoodoo in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, divine magic in ancient Mesoamerica, puissant poems in alternate worlds, or strange science in far-flung futures, the characters in these fifteen tales strive to remake the world for the better. But power always exacts a price, sometimes dearer than we can bear. Buoyed by Bowles' lyrical mastery of genre, Huckleberry Juju and Other Narrative Spells guides us through the interstices between what is and what might be, a liminal space where we can imagine the aftermath of our dreams.
War Bonds is a book of poems about survival in the face of conflict, from Iraq and Afghanistan, to #BlackLivesMatter, the war in Ambazonia and Cameroon, and gang violence in California's Central Valley. The book jumps back in time 100 years to the archive of a Chicago pianist and painter, Edna Cookingham, who worked with the YMCA in France to entertain the troops at the end of WWI. Her letters, telegrams, diary, photographs, and war papers serve as source material for these poems. While Europe may have experienced demobilization and a peace process in 1919, the echoes of that conflict continue to be felt around the world, binding us still. The book explores how we move forward - bound together - after conflict, violence, terror, or mass trauma.
Traveling and being transported to another place means experiencing different seasons and times. It is an essential part of Xánath Caraza's poetry. The feeling given by the pages of You Will Weave Destiny stems from the complexity of the images with which we are presented. These Nahuatl images and objects appear as offerings for our appreciation and to bring us closer to times that initially seem remote.This collection is also a passionate homage to one of the women who made a difference in fifteenth century Tenochtitlan. Macuilxochitzin or Macuilxochitl was a poet born during the most prosperous period of the expansion of the Aztec civilization. Daughter of the royal advisor Tlacaelel and niece of the Tlatoani warrior Axayacatl. Her life and her texts are an example of the gender parallelism of pre-Hispanic Mexico where women had the same opportunities as men.
Somos Nopales has been called beautiful, powerful, and chingón. It's the poetic journey of the son of a Mexican immigrant written as he navigates a world where American, Mexican, and Mexican-American cultures collide, co-mingle, and occasionally cooperate. The book serves as a tour into a Nepantlero heart, moving in and among the in-between spaces where the poet often finds himself. Along the journey, readers will meet Vega's family along with other characters which enrich the South Texas narrative. Poems touch on subjects including: identity, immigration, family history, and Chicano culture.
Brenna Womer's latest cross-genre collection examines what Layli Long Soldier calls "unbrained things." In her poem "Head Count," Long Soldier names hormones, nursing, sleeping, night, and blood. In Womer's collection, she adds shedding, shitting, birthing, fucking, flying, and more to the list.In the titular hybrid essay, "Unbrained," first published by Honey Literary, Womer considers her recent Bipolar diagnosis by a psychiatric nurse with whom she had a single appointment and never saw again. In the closing essay, "Thick Like Me," which won NELLE's Three Sister's Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Womer grapples with a matrilineal legacy of relentless identity-seeking and what of her Mexican heritage she can claim after growing up in whitewashed familial spaces and on U.S. military bases. In her poetry, prose, and hybrid work throughout, Womer interrogates ownership and indulges appetite; she presses through the softness of fur and fat to the hot core of animal innocence. On every page, she asks what's fair but always comes up empty.
Crushed & Crowned guides the reader through a "museum of bodies," seeking to "illuminate thedarkest corners of our history. From sanitation workers killed in Memphis, to elegies aimed atresurrection, these poems forbid sleeping. Murals of saints guard refugees, statues replaceenslavers with confident Black teens, a high school teacher observes the joys and sorrows of hisstudents. These poems also stop us at one of the world's largest refugee camps, inviting us to seeLGBTQ refugees and their plight. These poems center the lives of Harriet Tubman and FrederickDouglass, considering their places in our history. These poems believe that if we read and livewith the right spirit, the "crushed" of our world can end up "crowned."
Kathryn Silver-Hajo's debut novel paints an unforgettable portrait of the life of young protagonist, Noor, as she navigates the dangers of civil war in her native Lebanon and the challenges of life in the diaspora in the New York City of the 1970s. Silver-Hajo deftly portrays the tragedy of a country torn apart by sectarian conflict, but also the excitement of the teenaged narrator's coming-of-age adventures. But when her mother reveals a closely-held secret, Noor is shaken, yet wiser and more determined than ever to define her place in the world. The characters and events that animate Roots of the Banyan Tree promise to burrow deep in readers' hearts and refuse to be forgotten.
Poetry. CONTRA: TEXAS POETS SPEAK OUT is a poetry anthology of over 40+ amazing writers from West, North, East, Central and South Texas. Edited by Rooster Martinez and Chibbi Orduña, CONTRA's mission is to: a) activate people to register to vote; b) activate people to GO VOTE; and c) donate FlowerSong Press's profits from book sales to MOVE Texas. In collaboration with Write Art Out, FlowerSong Press, and Gemini Ink, Texas poets have donated work that speaks to these times we're living in, the fears people are facing, the just activism being fought in the streets, the importance of representation, a commitment to a pro-democracy nation, and hope for the future.
Boundless 2023, the official anthology of the 16th Annual Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival.
In Esteban Rodríguez's seventh collection, places both populated and barren become sources of contemplation as much as they do of uncertainty. With a voice that is lyrically bold but narratively focused, Rodriguez's speakers attempt to navigate purgatorial landscapes, cultural labyrinths of the past, and an array of spontaneous scenarios that occupy the always precarious present. Whether on a bus ride in a foreign city, near the scorched edge of an indifferent country, or during a surreal encounter with figures who aren't always what they proclaim to be, Limbolandia traverses the world in hopes of finding not only a new way of survival, but a safe path toward the truth.
Between bodies and language. Between artist and survivor. Between aquí y allá. Straddling sacred spaces, Chicanx writer Michelle Otero claims deep roots in a mestiza landscape. Through memory, poems, dreams, and letters, Vessels: A Memoir of Borders is a mythical journey celebrating "Herencia" and "Ritual" as the presence of the past-her own as well as that of her ancestors. She evokes a deep sense of intentional healing while embracing and disrupting relationships. Recounting the vital lessons of her traumas with an open heart, she shapes a profound memoir as an offering for us to witness our own prayers. --Richard Yañez, author of El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border
Poet Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead (Libro centroamericanode los muertos), winner of the 2018 Premio Aguascalientes, Mexico's highest poetryhonor, is a sequence of poems in multiple voices, interwoven with the author's ownnarrative, about Central American migrants and refugees, living and dead, journeyingthrough Mexico to the north. The book also interweaves altered passages from A BriefAccount of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanishcolonist (later friar and bishop) who became the first and fiercest critic of Spanishcolonialism in the New World and the enslavement of indigenous people.The work's importance has already been well recognized in Mexico. For readersin the U.S. and the English-speaking world, it draws a compelling portrait of one of themost critical stories of our time, in poems of great formal variety and lyrical depth: themassive migration of Central Americans fleeing terror, crime, and extreme poverty, andthe persecution and danger they face in traveling through Mexico to the United States.The book is divided into five sections, for the five main countries of origin in thismigration: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico itself. Each sectioncontains portraits of migrants; first-person testimonies of the dead, often titled by theprecise locations where their bodies may be found; and poems that deploy variedsources, including news stories and political and scientific reports, to give fuller context to the human tales. The beginning and end of the book, and each of its five sections, areframed by what Rodrigo calls a palimpsest: his altered passages from Bartolomé de lasCasas' classic cry of protest, situating the work within a broader Latin American story.Poems from the English translation of Libro centroamericano have appeared inAsymptote, Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry International.
PIEDRA, a new collection of poems by Luis Alberto Urrea¿That which cannot be destroyed - so it is, this is Urrea's Piedra Tao, Urrea's third eye swiveling across the cosmos & canyons, timeless in "this kernel of corn," an endless spiraling prayer of the rezanderas, an inky rosario of vision heat, caminatas, a sitting on the "oldest stone on the earth," as he writes he throws his arms up, cracks open his chest to the night stars and the sacred blaze of the "angel factory" - he chants, he whispers, tender and ragged on the "curve of cerulean blue" the poems, the book. The "Piedra," "arises "wild and free," this is ocean magic, restitched sizzling bullets of Zapata, you will eat seashell and taste "Belgian stamps," you will lean on wild wolves, smell their pelts, you will "feed iguanas," you will eat at the restaurant of Urrea's mysteries, unlock their ancient honeyed lips and smear your face upon them and their shadows will come to you and you will enter the life and lives of the blinking elements of Piedra consciousness forever. I absolutely love this book, these poems, these short-line and long-line, night and dawn painted teachings. An incredible pyramid and temple of word magic. Bravissimo! No doubt, no return. -Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus
2020 changed us. From a global pandemic that uprooted our lives and took the lives ofcountless loved ones, to cries for justice that rang out across the world, 2020 is a year that wecannot forget. It's a year that we shouldn't forget. Written almost entirely in isolation duringthe COVID-19 pandemic, Our Bones Ache Together is a journey of heartache, home, healing,and hope. Documenting the disappearance of the middle class, growing wealth disparity, andlife during seemingly endless unprecedented times, these poems remind us of the pain wecarry, but also of the hands we hold to keep moving. Life goes on, even when we don't believeit can. From the coldest winter, spring blooms.
A Cuban curandera who is haunted by the ghost of the doctor she is rumored to have killed. A 20th century matchmaker who refuses to admit the truth about a new client. One night with an invisible waitress and the customers she serves in an intergalactic diner. A man tasked with choosing to leave or colonize a new planet with strange life forms. A hidden, turquoise-filled civilization hidden underneath the ancient ruins of Puebla Bonito. A haunted Zoot Suit that fulfills broken familial obligations.Places We Build In The Universe is an anthology of Latine/x genre fiction from both new and established adult authors.The stories in this anthology fit into three overall genre categories: romance, sci-fi & fantasy, and gothic horror. They cover adult characters, but the themes are universal in scope. The stories focus in on relationships- new, falling apart, or long gone. They explore fantasies, revelations, mistakes, and amends. This anthology is a celebration: one full of magical realism and shared Latine experiences. Spanning cultures and continents and backgrounds, this collection was collated as an example of escapism in its purest form.Through the segments in this anthology, you will come across familiar character arcs and tropes, but interpreted through our varied cultures. At the core of the stories, are themes of finding yourself, love and lust, grief, longing, complacency, and comfort.This anthology delves into all of the traditions and experiences that are found through Latinidad.Contributors: Violet Castro, Samantha Ortiz, Lauren T. Davila, Selena Delvalle, Michelle Flores, Rosario Martinez, Lydia San Andres, Zaida Polanco, Sabrina Sol, C.M. Leyva, Marisa G. Doherty, Ida Duque, PD Loupee, Jeff de Leon, Aurora Martinez, Nico Vazquez, Yamilette Vizcaino, and Tristan Tarwater.Cover design by Tania Alejandra Jiménez Godines.
If the question is America-and by extension, who is and what does it mean to be American? -AFRICANAMERICAN'T offers no answers. The CAN'T in the title suggests impossibility and that is precisely what the book is interested in. Even in the so-called land of opportunity, some things remain impossible for its speaker(s). In a way, AFRICANAMERICAN'T is a document of attempted refusals: assimilation, forgetting, and allegiance to any one country. However valid despair might be as a response to the continued failings of his two countries, Ayokunle Falomo traverses the distance between betrayal and love in an attempt to find poetry-and perhaps, something like hope-in all the places it can't be found.¿¿
Reverberating Voices, speaks about the Central American diaspora-- multiple voices retelling Garay's personal history and the histories of others--the various oppression: political persecution, racism, class, and gender inequities, etc. Diasporic oppression is experienced on both sides of the US-Mexican border by both Salvadorans and Nicaraguans during the Salvadoran civil war and Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1980s. Although Reverberating Voices represents the oppressive struggles suffered by Central Americans in the US and in their homeland, its characters speak as heterogeneous subjects of history, speaking collectively about their histories of Diaspora and love. Also, Reverberating Voices will fill a void in the United States because stories about the Central America-Latino Diaspora are for the most part underrepresented within the US Latino Literary canon.
In Wildflowers for the Bullies, Rothenberg takes energetic poetic aim at some of the most glaring political issues of the day, including racism, economic injustice, police brutality, and our overly commercialized culture industry with its "zombie billboards" and "sponsored straightjackets." In his deeply moving poem, "War," Rothenberg uses varied and inventively phrased perspectives ("We imagine the shark a killing machine / We become the killing machine") to note how thoroughly the idea of war has infiltrated Americans' daily lives, offering "love as the answer."
Welch engages with the edges of the United States in these biographic poems about their kidnapping, their difficulties as a gay/trans individual, and their alliance with Witchcraft. Among unstable poems and juxtaposition, Welch searches for the poetic body just beyond the physical one, "That I am challenged to embody my own Nature, othered by forces outside myself, to reassert a peace, my peace, that was dirtied for the benefit of privileging males is an undertaking I revisit and resent daily. This act of returning to myself, by rejecting the world, is dark and is the source of my power as a Witch. These practices speak throughout my poetry."As the title nails down, Welch also impugns upon the intentions that capitalism harbors against us, the living. "For Capitalism to work, it teaches us, on many levels, to disconnect from our natural empathy, from the homeless, from the countries we're calmly bombing, and from the other beings sharing our world. The narrative of laziness turns connection to cruelty, and poetry exposes such fictions. Poetry furthers our empathy with one another, including our empathy with everyday objects. Poetry isn't lazy-it never rests."
Charting the personal and the political, the lyrical and the prosaic, with an intense interrogation of anti-Blackness that centers Trans-Atlantic and Latinx Blackness in all its vastness, beauty, and pride, this necessary book compiles the best of Garcia's three poetry collections. These selected poems will introduce Garcia's work to a broader audience. Like the poem it takes its title from, What Can I Tell You conveys a poet wrestling with what it means to make poetry from the bread of life. At times formal and playful, and at others deadly serious, Garcia's full range of themes and obsessions is on full display within its pages.
"These poems that chatter, connect, and copulate have been written with the precise hands of a poet who by her very nature multiplies and easily welcomes us in. I can't read the poem 'Foreign' without tears welling up for its truth-telling and in a way that's absolutely unique to this poet, and it's hardly the only poem in this collection that demonstrates Gutiérrez y Muhs is a curandera of poetry, a proprietor of myth. I'm startled to find in these poems so much that has been lost. On a quest for a currency of culture, she also gives readers a currency of love." -Patrice Vecchione, author of My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice: A Guide to Writing Poetry & Speaking Your Truth and co-editor of Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience
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