Camino Del Sol – serie

Fleeing a failed marriage and haunted by ghosts of his past, Luis Alberto Urrea jumped into his car several years ago and headed west. Driving cross-country with a cat named Rest Stop, Urrea wandered the West from one year's Spring through the next. Hiking into aspen forests where leaves ""shiver and tinkle like bells"" and poking alongside creeks in the Rockies, he sought solace and wisdom. In the forested mountains he learned not only the names of trees—he learned how to live.As nature opened Urrea's eyes, writing opened his heart. In journal entries that sparkle with discovery, Urrea ruminates on music, poetry, and the landscape. With wonder and spontaneity, he relates tales of marmots, geese, bears, and fellow travelers. He makes readers feel mountain air ""so crisp you feel you could crunch it in your mouth"" and reminds us all to experience the magic and healing of small gestures, ordinary people, and common creatures.Urrea has been heralded as one of the most talented writers of his generation. In poems, novels, and nonfiction, he has explored issues of family, race, language, and poverty with candor, compassion, and often astonishing power. Wandering Time offers his most intimate work to date, a luminous account of his own search for healing and redemption.

Adding to the Latina tradition, Carmen Giménez Smith, politically aware and feminist-oriented, focuses on general cultural references rather than a sentimental personal narrative. She speaks of sexual politics and family in a fierce, determined tone voracious in its opinions about freedom and responsibility.The author engages in mythology and art history, musically wooing the reader with texture and voice. As she references such disparate cultural figures as filmmaker Lars Von Trier, Annie from the film Annie Get Your Gun, Nabokov’s Lolita, facebook entries and Greek gods, they appear as part of the poet’s cultural critique.Phrases such as “the caustic domain of urchins” and “the gelatin shiver of tea’s surface” take the poems from lyrical images to comic humor to angry, intense commentary. On writing about “downgrading into human,” she says, “Then what? Amorality, osteoporosis and not even a marble estuary for the ages.”Giménez Smith’s poetic arsenal includes rapier-sharp wordplay mixed with humor, at times self-deprecating, at others an ironic comment on the postmodern world, all interwoven with imaginative language of unexpected force and surreal beauty. Revealing a long view of gender issues and civil rights, the author presents a clever, comic perspective. Her poems take the reader to unusual places as she uses rhythm, images, and emotion to reveal the narrator’s personality. Deftly blending a variety of tones and styles, Giménez Smith’s poems offer a daring and evocative look at deep cultural issues.

Includes an audio CD of the author reading!For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected. Through a variety of stages and transformations, Herrera has evolved more than almost any other Chicano poet, always re-inventing himself into a more mature and seasoned voice.Now, in this unprecedented collection, we encounter the trajectory of this highly innovative and original writer, bringing the full scope of his singular vision into view. Beginning with early material from A Certain Man and moving through thirteen of his collections into new, previously unpublished work, this assemblage also includes an audio CD of the author reading twenty-four selected poems aloud. Serious scholars and readers alike will now have available to them a representative set of glimpses into his production as well as his origins and personal development. The ultimate value of bringing together such a collection, however, is that it will allow us to better understand and appreciate the complexity of what this major American poet is all about.

In 2004 twenty-eight women and young girls were murdered in Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding areas. The tragedy escalated to fifty-eight murders in 2006, then again to eighty-six in 2008, and current estimates top four hundred deaths. Now poet Valerie Martínez offers a poetic exploration of these events, pushing boundaries?stylistically and artistically?with vivid poems that contextualize femicide. Martínez departs from traditional narrative to reveal the hidden effects and outcomes of the horrific and heart-wrenching cases of femicide. These poems?lyric fragments and prose passages that form a collage?have an intricate relation to one another, creating a complex literary quilt that feels like it can be read from the beginning, the end, or anywhere in between. Martínez is personally invested in the topic, evoking the loss of hersister, and Each and Her emerges as a biography of sorts and a compelling homage to all those who have suffered. Other authors may elaborate on or investigate this topic, but Martínez humanizes it by including names, quotations, realistic details, and stark imagery. The women of Juárez, like other women around the world, are ravaged by inequality, discontinuity, politics,and economic plagues that contribute to gender violence. Martínez offers us a poignant and alarming glance into another world with these never-before-told stories. Her refreshing and explosive voice will keep readers transfixed and intrigued about these events and emotions?removed from us and yet so close to the heart.

Through lyrical procedures of self-immolation, this brave new collection by J. Michael Martinez interrogates the sundry roles language, myth, and sexuality play for the self and the other in the recoverable and irrecoverable past. Parallel to his award-winning first collection Heredities, J. Michael Martinez pushes the boundaries of poetic form, wedding historically oppositional lyrical traditions to deliver a collection unlike any other.Turning the page into a visual field, as in the deconstructed musical score telling the tale of La Llorona, In the Garden of the Bridehouse questions the line between visual art and poetry. The work employs the vernacular, the stylized language of theory, and the blank canvas of the page in its exploration of the known and unknowable.Throughout the work, Martinez paradoxically exercises both a lyrical minimalism and a baroque poetic, uniting Mesoamerican preconquest imaginary with the sensuality of the Biblical Song of Songs, cultivating a lyrical space wherein contrasting potentials are—as one—realized in their shared promise.

Canto Hondo / Deep Song honors the Andalusian deep lyric, or canto hondo, poetry of famed Spanish writer Federico García Lorca through rich and expressive poems. Francisco X. Alarcón deftly places Spanish and English side-by-side in this bilingual collection that is a modern meditation on love, self, loss, and universal truths.In this new collection, Alarcón creates poetry with roots in Gypsy songs clapped out in the distinctively short rhythms of flamenco music. Each page lifts the heart and stirs the soul by delving deep into the struggle for self and sexual identity.Canto Hondo / Deep Song includes 106 poems divided into four sections that articulate struggle, otherness, and the meaning of the poetic landscape. Like Lorca, Alarcón seeks out the fault lines where the lyric and the political bleed productively and proactively into one another.An important voice in Chicano and GLBT poetry, Alarcón writes with a complex, emotionally powerful style that is accessible to students and all lovers of poetry and poetic traditions.

From the fall of Troy recorded at the beginning of Western poetry to the ongoing mass extinction of species, Twelve Clocks meditates on the temporality of loss across the many scales of our experience and knowledge. Framed by central images of beginnings and ends, this collection searches six cities and intervals of time for the measures of loss, labor, and care. Through formal innovations derived from the second, the minute, the hour, etc., and the methods of their measure, these poems move from the stark violence of Homer's tale to the terrible precision and power of the atomic age.As the reader is transported from Las Vegas to Argentina to the landscapes of Ancient Greek epic poetry, Twelve Clocks explores the connections between song, ancestry, family, loss, and time. If the imagery of the collection hints Troy might be an image of the wrecked Argentine economy under neoliberal economics, the poems eschew the abstractions of politics in favor of a vivid and sensuous lyricism.The interconnectivity of the poems in Twelve Clocks is mirrored by different elements' transcendence throughout the collection. The clock that goes missing in one poem turns up in another, characters vanish and reappear, matter destroyed in one poem reoccurs as energy in another, and then matter and energy both go missing. Taken together, the poems confront the literary legacy of Western poetic tradition and our shared future.

Is poetry an alternative to or an extension of a globalized language? In Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico, poet Urayoán Noel maps the spaces between and across languages, cities, and bodies, creating a hemispheric poetics that is both broadly geopolitical and intimately neurological.In this expansive collection, we hear the noise of cities such as New York, San Juan, and Sao Paulo abuzz with flickering bodies and the rush of vernaculars as untranslatable as the murmur in the Spanish rumor. Oscillating between baroque textuality and vernacular performance, Noel's bilingual poems experiment with eccentric self-translation, often blurring the line between original and translation as a way to question language hierarchies and allow for translingual experiences.A number of the poems and self-translations here were composed on a smartphone, or else de- and re-composed with a variety of smartphone apps and tools, in an effort to investigate the promise and pitfalls of digital vernaculars. Noel's poetics of performative self-translation operates not only across languages and cultures but also across forms: from the décima and the “staircase sonnet” to the collage, the abecedarian poem, and the performance poem.In its playful and irreverent mash-up of voices and poetic traditions from across the Americas, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico imagines an alternative to the monolingualism of the U.S. literary and political landscape, and proposes a geo-neuro-political performance attuned to damaged or marginalized forms of knowledge, perception, and identity.

During the advent of Chicano teatro, dozens of groups sprang up across the country in Chicano/a communities. Since then, teatristas have been leading voices in the creation and production of plays touching minds and hearts that galvanize audiences to action. Barrio Dreams is the first book to collect the work of one of Arizona's foremost teatristas, playwright Silviana Wood. During her decades-long involvement in theater, Wood forged a reputation as a playwright, actor, director, and activist. Her works form a testimonio of Chicana life, steeped in art, politics, and the borderlands. Wood's plays challenge, question, and incite women to consider their lot in life. She ruptures stereotypes and raises awareness of social issues via humor and with an emphasis on the use of the physical body on stage. The play Una vez, en un barrio de sueños . . . offers a glimpse into familiar terrain—the barrio and its dwellers—in three actos. In Amor de hija, a fraught mother-daughter relationship in contemporary working-class Arizona is dealt an additional blow as the family faces Alzheimer's disease. In the tragedy A Drunkard's Tale of Melted Wings and Memories, and in the trilingual (Spanish, English, and Yaqui) tragicomedy Yo, Casimiro Flores, characters love, live, die, travel through time and space, and visit the afterlife. And in Anhelos por Oaxaca, a grandfather travels back in time through flashbacks, as he and his grandson travel through homelands from Arizona to Oaxaca. Part of Wood's genius is the way she portrays life in what Gloria Anzaldúa called ""el mundo zurdo,"" that space inhabited by the people of color, the poor, the female, and the outsiders. It is a place for the atravesados, the odd, the different, those who do not fit the mainstream. The people who inhabit Wood's plays are common folk—janitors, mothers, grandmothers, and teenagers—hardworking people who, in one way or another, have made their way in life and who embody life in the barrio.

Emmy Pérez’s poetry collection With the River on Our Face flows through the Southwest and the Texas borderlands to the river’s mouth in the Rio Grande Valley/El Valle. The poems celebrate the land, communities, and ecology of the borderlands through lyric and narrative utterances, auditory and visual texture, chant, and litany that merge and diverge like the iconic river in this long-awaited collection. Pérez reveals the strengths and nuances of a universe where no word is “foreign.” Her fast-moving, evocative words illuminate the prayers, gasps, touches, and gritos born of everyday discoveries and events. Multiple forms of reference enrich the poems in the form of mantra: ecologist’s field notes, geopolitical and ecofeminist observations, wildlife catalogs, trivia, and vigil chants.“What is it to love / within viewing distance of night / vision goggles and guns?” is a question central to many of these poems. The collection creates a poetic confluence of the personal, political, and global forces affecting border lives. Whether alluding to El Valle as a place where toxins now cross borders more easily than people or wildlife, or to increased militarization, immigrant seizures, and twenty-first-century wall-building, Pérez’s voice is intimate and urgent. She laments, “We cannot tattoo roses / On the wall / Can’t tattoo Gloria Anzaldúa’s roses / On the wall”; yet, she also reaffirms Anzaldúa’s notions of hope through resilience and conocimiento. With the River on Our Face drips deep like water, turning into amistad— an inquisition into human relationships with planet and self.

In this love story of impossible odds, award-winning writer Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a rich and visionary portrait of Bea Franco, the real woman behind famed American author Jack Kerouac’s “The Mexican Girl.” Set against an ominous backdrop of California in the 1940s, deep in the agricultural heartland of the Great Central Valley, Mañana Means Heaven reveals the desperate circumstances that lead a married woman to an illicit affair with an aspiring young writer traveling across the United States. When they meet, Franco is a migrant farmworker with two children and a failing marriage, living with poverty, violence, and the looming threat of deportation, while the “college boy” yearns to one day make a name for himself in the writing world. The significance of their romance poses vastly different possibilities and consequences.Mañana Means Heaven deftly combines fact and fiction to pull back the veil on one of literature’s most mysterious and evocative characters. Inspired by Franco’s love letters to Kerouac and Hernandez’s interviews with Franco, now in her nineties and living in relative obscurity, the novel brings this lost gem of a story out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut uses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time with a sense of compassion for the hard choices we must make to survive. Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements; they play out in our everyday lives, in the intimate spaces of family, sex, and neighborhood. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all cities like it—as they have always been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.

Wanderers and writers, gangbangers and lawyers, dreamers and devils. The King of Lighting Fixtures paints an idiosyncratic but honest portrait of Los Angeles, depicting how the city both entrances and confounds. Each story serves as a reflection of Daniel A. Olivas’s grand City of Angels, a “magical metropolis where dreams come true.”The characters here represent all walks of L.A. life—from Satan’s reluctant Craigslist roommate to a young girl coping with trauma at her brother’s wake—and their tales ebb and flow among various styles, including magical realism, social realism, and speculative fiction. Like a jazz album, they glide and bop, tease and illuminate, sadden and hearten as they navigate effortlessly from meta to fabulist, from flash fiction to longer, more complex narratives.These are literary sketches of a Los Angeles that will surprise, connect, and disrupt readers wherever they may live.

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.Combining years of painstaking investigative research and masterful storytelling, award-winning author Tim Z. Hernandez weaves a captivating narrative from testimony, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, reconstructing the incident and the lives behind the legendary song. This singularly original account pushes narrative boundaries, while challenging perceptions of what it means to be an immigrant in America, but more importantly, it renders intimate portraits of the individual souls who, despite social status, race, or nationality, shared a common fate one frigid morning in January 1948.

For beloved writer and mentor Francisco X. Alarcón, the collection Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation was a poetic quest to reclaim a birthright. Originally published in 1992, the book propelled Alarcón to the forefront of contemporary Chicano letters.Alarcón was a stalwart student, researcher, and specialist on the lost teachings of his Indigenous ancestors. He first found their wisdom in the words of his Mexica (Aztec) grandmother and then by culling through historical texts. During a Fulbright fellowship to Mexico, Alarcón uncovered the writings of zealously religious Mexican priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón (1587–1646), who collected (often using extreme measures), translated, and interpreted Nahuatl spells and invocations.In Snake Poems Francisco Alarcón offered his own poetic responses, reclaiming the colonial manuscript and making it new. This special edition is a tender tribute to Alarcón, who passed away in 2016, and includes Nahuatl, Spanish, and English renditions of the 104 poems based on Nahuatl invocations and spells that have survived more than three centuries. The book opens with remembrances and testimonials about Alarcón's impact as a writer, colleague, activist, and friend from former poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and poet and activist Odilia Galván Rodríguez, who writes, ""This book is another one of those doors that [Francisco] opened and invited us to enter. Here we get to visit a snapshot in time of an ancient place of Nahuatl-speaking ancestors, and Francisco's poetic response to what he saw through their eyes.

This collection is a beautifully crafted exploration of life in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Written by Norma Elia Cantú, the award-winning author of Canícula, this collection carries the perspective of a powerful force in Chicana literature-and literature worldwide.The poems are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa&'s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands.Poems addressed to talented and influential women such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Adrienne Rich, among others, pour gratitude and recognition into the collection. While many of the poems in Meditación Fronteriza are gentle and inviting, there are also moments that grieve for the state of the borderlands, calling for political resistance.

In Alberto Álvaro RÍos's new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own, adding warmth and humor to this continually surprising communal narrative. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border-a stretch of land generally referred to as the PimerÍa Alta-an ancient passage through the desert that connected the territory of Tucson in the north and Guaymas and Hermosillo in the south. The United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and, in the middle of the century, not the only thing to think about. Mexico City is somewhere to the south, but nobody can say where and nobody has ever seen it.RÍos has created a whimsical yet familiar town, where brightly unique characters love fiercely and nurture those around them. The people in A Good Map of All Things have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul, without lotteries or easy answers or particular luck. Theirs is the everyday, with its small but meaningful joy. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Álvaro RÍos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community.

Transversal takes a  disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, UrayoÁn Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.Featuring Noel's bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel's experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor HemisfÉrico. This collection explores walking poems improvised on a smartphone, as well as remixed classical and experimental forms. Poems are presented in interlocking bilingual versions that complicate the relationship between translation and original, and between English and Spanish as languages of empire and popular struggle. The book creatively examines translation and its simultaneous urgency and impossibility in a time of global crisis.Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.

In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing, cockroaches seep from the walls, and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature rather than fight it. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighbouring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado--life, American style.What follows is a story in which mysteries are unravelled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways--all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away. There are no easy solutions to the issues the characters face in this story, and their various realities--as undocumented workers, Border Patrol agents, the American supervisor of a Mexican factory employing an impoverished workforce--never play out against a black-and-white moral canvas. Instead, they are complex human beings with sometimes messy lives who struggle to create a place for themselves in a part of the world like no other, even as they are forced to confront the lives they have made.All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong--within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.

When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community.By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas. The volume offers up three central questions: How do queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent address memory? What are the textures of caring, being cared for, and accepting care as Black queer and/or trans people of Latin American descent? And how do queer and trans embodiments help us understand and/or question the past and the present, and construct a Black, queer, and trans future?The works collected in this anthology encompass a multitude of genres--including poetry, autobiography, short stories, diaries, visual art, and a graphic memoir--and feature the voices of established writers alongside emerging voices. Together, the contributors challenge everything we think we know about gender, sexuality, race, and what it means to experience a livable life.

In Diego BÁez’s debut collection, YaguaretÉ White, English, Spanish, and GuaranÍ encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar.The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, BaÉz grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, BaÉz revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.Notably, this raucous collection also wrestles with GuaranÍ, a state-recognized Indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay. GuaranÍ both structures and punctures the book, surfacing in a sequence of jokes that double as poems, and introducing but leaving unresolved ambient questions about local histories of militarism, masculine bravado, and the outlook of the campos. Cutting across borders of every kind, BaÉz’s poems attempt to reconcile the incomplete, contradictory, and inconsistent experiences of a speaking self that resides between languages, nations, and generations.YaguaretÉ White is a lyrical exploration of Paraguayan American identity and what it means to see through a colored whiteness in all of its tangled contradictions.

In the remote mountains of Oaxaca, the Beatniks have arrived. María Sabina, the renowned Mazatec healer, spends her days in the small town of Huautla de Jiménez selling produce at the market and foraging under the new moon for the sacred mushrooms that grow near her home - her holy children, Carne de Dios, or Flesh of the Gods. But her life changes forever when an amateur mycologist from New York, with a cameraman in tow, visits her to experience for himself the mushroom ceremony, or velada, he knows only from whispers in anthropological records. When he publishes an unauthorized article about his experience in LIFE Magazine 1957, the stage is set for an explosive encounter between the burgeoning international counterculture and the woman who became an unwilling icon of the psychedelic revolution. Homero Aridjis's novel, vividly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts, tells the story of the motley crew of bohemians, researchers, and holy fools, both real and imagined, who descend on the town of Huautla de Jiménez searching for inspiration, distraction, and salvation in the sacred mushrooms. These seekers melt in and out of a narrative infiltrated by the slipstream logic of dreams. As John Lennon plays jazz on the patio of the Hotel Grande, Juan Rulfo contemplates horror movies, and Allen Ginsberg recites mantras at Philip Lamantia's wedding, María Sabina's life is increasingly thrown into turmoil. Carne de Dios is a masterful and often humorous blend of history, myth, and poetic imagination, captured in a translation that mirrors the hallucinatory beauty of Aridjis's original Spanish. Aridjis's intimate portrayal of María Sabina, informed by his personal connection to her, serves as both a tribute to her enduring legacy and a critical reflection on the wave of global interest in mushroom culture still gaining momentum today. This English translation includes an introduction by the translator and an afterword by the author.

“The poems in this collection began as a search for a history of my ancestors in a small, isolated valley in northern New Mexico. But no one wrote it down, and I was left to construct a poetic history where there were no written records . . .”Leo Romero stands as a foundational figure in Latino letters. With six books of poetry and a book of short fiction to his name, Romero’s contribution to the literary canon is profound and enduring. Bringing together for the first time his new and selected poems, Trees Dream of Water reflects Romero’s journey from youth to maturity as a person and a poet, and his deep connection to New Mexico and its culture. Traversed by memory, myth, and observation of the natural world, these poems explore family, community belonging and conflict, life as an artist, and the cycles of life and death. This lyrical anthology includes accompanying essays to illuminate Romero’s life and work for longtime admirers and new readers alike.

In City of Eves, Silvia Bonilla evokes the lives and longing of three young women who suspect the wider world is a ship on the verge of departure—and who are determined not to be stranded on shore. Sonia and her two best friends grow up on the urban coast of Ecuador, sharing cigarettes, school uniforms, and a determination to overcome their circumstances even if the price to pay is exile. Full of fantasies and curiosity, the friends navigate hunger at home, absent parents, and religious pressures as they help each other through the pleasures and traumas of adolescence. As their desire for something greater changes from dreams into actions, they pursue escape routes that hover between choice and compulsion: forced marriages, early widowhood, and a death-haunted migration to the United States. Even in the throes of escape, the constraints of their reality always lie waiting. Subtle and unsparing, Bonilla’s lyrical poems capture the wild inner horizons and vivid embodiment of youth as it shades into the reflective poignance of maturity marked by disappointment, compromise, and loss. Despite this, it is memories of deep friendship, bonded through shared understanding and aspiration, that lingers. Looking back on her life, Sonia recalls the courage and vitality of girls determined to shape their own futures: “We lifted Coca-Cola bottles to the / opened granadilla of our mouths.”