Latina/o Literature and
Literature of the Americas at the
University of Northern Colorado

Southwest Women's Literature (poetry)

Castillo, Ana

MY FATHER WAS A TOLTEC AND SELECTED POEMS

((C)1995, W.W. Norton & Company, 158 pages, $18.95 hardcover, ISBN: 0-393-03718-5)

AUTHOR: Ana Castillo is the author of the novels The Mixquiahuala Letters, Sapagonia, and, most recently, So Far From God. She is also the author of Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. She has received an American Book Award, A Carl Sandburg Award, and a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for her fiction and an NEA grant in 1990 for her poetry. NOTES: Ana Castillo has a deserved reputation as one of the country's most powerful and entrancing novelists, but she began her literary career as a poet of passion and uncompromising commitment. This collection brings back into print the best of her early work, including selected poems from The Invitation and Women Are Not Roses and the entire text of her landmark 1988 collection, My Father Was A Toltec. Whether invoking her origins as the daughter of a street warrior, a member of the Toltec gang in Chicago, or defining her own lyrical positions on a variety of social, political, sexual, and esthetic issues, Ana Castillo's poetic voice is unmistakenably her own - and will be immediately recognizable to the lovers of her fiction.

Cervantes, Lorna Dee

FROM THE CABLES OF GENOCIDE: POEMS ON LOVE AND HUNGER ((C)1991, Arte Publico Press, 78 pages, $7 paperback, ISBN: 1-55885-033-3)

AUTHOR: Jessica Hagedorn writes: "Lorna Dee Cervantes is a poet with a clear, strong voice who deserves a wider audience."

NOTES: If Emplumada, Lorna Dee Cervantes' first celebrated collection of poetry, is the work of a poet on her way to becoming a major voice in American literature, "From The Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger" will confirm her as one of the most talented and compelling poets writing today. Cervantes stretches the resources of language, imagery and the dialectics of love, hunger and aesthetics to express a penetrating feminist and human vision of her universe.

Cisneros, Sandra

LOOSE WOMAN

((C)1994, Alfred A. Knopf, 114 pages, $16 hardcover)

AUTHOR: Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, and the recipient of numerous awards, Cisneros is also the author of "The House on Mango Street," "Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories," "Hairs-Pelitos," and "My Wicked, Wicked Ways." She lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is at work on the novel, "Caramelo." NOTES: Seductive, earthy, at times confessional, Sandra Cisneros' vibrant new collection of poetry celebrates the female aspects of love - from the reflective to the overtly erotic - in a voice recognizable from her powerful works of fiction. These poems offer narratives as formally elegant as they are emotional and accessible. They are bound together by the voice of one woman, whose language spans cultures and continents. She is a woman who finds great strength from her roots in the barrio, and who knows better than to take herself too seriously, even as she struggles with the anguish of making sense - and making love - in a world she feels compelled to write about. With a multiplicity of moods tumbling through its lines - joyous and introspective, tender and ruthless, self-mocking and sincere, often funny and sometimes wild and rude - Loose Woman offers intoxicating poems of insight and vivid imagination.

Cisneros, Sandra

MY WICKED WICKED WAYS

(Turtle Bay Books, 103 pages, $15 hardcover)

AUTHOR: Sandra Cisneros was born in 1954.

NOTES: Her first collection of poetry, Bad Boys (1980), was published by Mango Press as part of the Chicano Chapbook Series. It is now out of print, but all the poems have been included in this volume. Here are the verses, comic and sad, radiantly pure and plainspoken, that rise like songs from the hearts of men and women.

Cordelia Candelaria

CHICANO POETRY: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

(Greenwood Press, 260 pages, $42.95 hardcover)

NOTES: This 1986 book includes the following chapters: Prologue: Summary of Chicano History; The Literary Context of Chicano Poetry; Chicano Poetry, Phase I: Movement; Chicano Poetry, Phase II: Toward a Chicano Poetics; Chicano Poetry, Phase III: The Flowering of Flor y Canto; The Circle of Poetry; Epilogue: The "Eyes" of Chicano Poetry; plus a bibliography, glossary and index.

Domingo, Margie

LAS MUJERES DE ATZLAN

(Existence InVerse, 39 pages, $4 chapbook)

AUTHOR: Born and reared in Denver, Margie Domingo values her spirit of the southwestern culture which is often revealed in her poetry. She began writing when she was 12, but only began doing readings publicly in 1990 in Denver and San Antonio.

NOTES: Includes monologues, readings and poetry.

Maria del Carmen Boza, Beverly Silva, Carmen Valle, Editors NOSOTRAS: LATINO LITERATURE TODAY

(Bilingual Review, 93 pages, $9 paperback).

AUTHORS: Includes Latina poetry and prose by Marjorie Agosin, Gloria AnzaldUa, Andrea-Teresa Arenas, Rosa Maria Arenas, Miriam Bornstein, Ana Castillo, Ina Cumpiano, Maria Herrera-Sobek, Carolina Mata de Woodruff, Pat Mora, Barbara MUjica, Achy Obejas, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Raquel Puig Zaldivar, Magaly QuiNones, Diana Rivera, Sonia Rivera-ValdEs, Eliana Rivero, Marta Salinas, Miriam de Uriarte, Alma Luz Villanueva, Helena Maria Viramontes. NOTES: Gary D. Keller writes in his introduction: "The literature anthologized in Nosotras provides a good index of the richness of themes, literary personae, and stylistic polyphonies being cultivated by Latina writers in the United States today. The editors of "Nosotras" ... bring to the volume ... the personal forknowledge of the Chicana, the Cuban-American and the Puerto Rican experience.

Velasquez, Gloria L.

I USED TO BE A SUPERWOMAN

((C)1995, Santa Monica College Press, 105 pages, $7.95 paperback) AUTHOR: Gloria L. Velasquez graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a Ph.D. in Latin American and Chicano Literatures. She has been included in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Francisco Lomelf and Carl R. Shirley and has received several distinguished awards: won the 11th Chicano Literary Prize in Fiction (University of California-Irvine); won the Premier and Deuxieme Prix in poetry (Stanford University, Dept. of French and Italian, 1979); and i n1989 she became the first Chicana to be inducted into the University of Northern Colorado's Hall of Fame for her achievement in creative writing. She is professor in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo where she resides with her husband and son.

NOTES: Gloria Velasquez, a demure and unassuming Chicana poet/scholar gives us in this collection - in stripped down, discreet language - a most potent and graphic montage of a world view that was here long before the Chicano Movement came along.

Pat Mora

BORDERS

(c1986, Arte Publico Press, 88 pages, $7 paperback, ISBN: 0-934770-57-3) AUTHOR: Pat Mora is the winner of the Southwest Book Award for her first book of desert incantations, "Chants."

NOTES: In "Borders," the El Paso native explores borders - political, cultural, social, emotional - that divide people, forming their individual identities while also challenging the very concept of society. As a poet who brings two cultures, two traditions, two languages and nations together, Mora holds a positive, a sane position on an otherwise divisive topic.

This list is certainly not all inclusive. I hope these recommended poetry collections for Southwest Women's Literature help.

Sincerely,

Ruben Sosa Villegas

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