Books of Interest by Writers of Color—Virgil Suárez, Sehba Sarwa, Toni Margarita Plummer

As I have mentioned before, many of the writers I list are friends or colleagues of mine. If I didn’t profile them, I’d profile many, many fewer writers and leave out some of the best. For today’s group of writer profiles, I must underline that caveat. One of the writers, Plummer, is my editor. I knew and loved her writing before she became my editor, and to refrain from listing her would leave a gap in the category of highly talented emerging fiction writers of color, so I choose to add her to the mix.

Virgil Suárez 90 Miles: New & Selected Poems (University of Pittsburg Press) Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, Suárez is one of the leading Latino writers of his time—in poetry, fiction, and memoir. In addition to his four novels, one collection of short stories, two memoirs, and nine books of poetry, he is also the editor of seven anthologies in which he brought Latino/a writers critical attention from the literary establishment. He is not only prolific but critically praised. His honors and awards include Best American Poetry, the Book Expo America/Latino Literature Hall of Fame Poetry Prize, The Daily News/The Caribbean Writer/University of The Virgin Islands Poetry Prize, the Florida State Individual Artist Grant, a G. MacCarthur Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has also been published in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, England, France, India, Israel, Spain, Venezuela, and New Zealand.

The major theme of Suárez’s work is displacement and the alienation that occurs in those whose hearts and histories are divided between two places and two cultures. He uses the tight, powerful narrative of his fiction, the everyday language and vivid imagery of his poetry, his memoirs’ poignant longing for something gone that possibly never really existed to evoke that quintessentially American trait of always being from somewhere else. Suárez is another of the major writers of color who expends much energy in mentoring and assisting emerging writers of color, well-known for his broader understanding of Latino community than many other Cuban writers. He is currently a professor of creative writing at Florida State University, living in Tallahasee, Florida, and Miami with his wife and daughters. Here is the link for Suárez’s book.

Sehba Sarwa black wings (Alhamra Publishing: Islamabad) Sarwa is a Pakistani American writer, artist, and activist. She divides her life between Karachi, Pakistan, the place where she was born into a family of artists, activists and educators, and Houston, Texas, the place she has adopted as home, recreating a community similar to the one in which she was raised. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have been published in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines in India, Pakistan, and the US, and her artwork and videos have been displayed in India, Pakistan, Egypt, and the United States. Her beautifully crafted novel, black wings, deals with women’s issues, family issues that move down the generations, and the sense of being loosed from moorings that living and moving between worlds brings. A member of the Macondo Writing Community, Sarwa is the founding director of Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), an organization that brings the voices of artists and writers from around the world to the table with the goal of broadening people’s paradigms and perspectives, and created an after-school writing workshop, Making Noise, for young girls whose voices are usually silenced.

I usually prefer to send you directly to the publisher, but since this publisher has no website, here is an online source for Sarwa’s book.

Toni Margarita Plummer The Bolero of Andi Rowe (Curbstone Press) Daughter of a Mexican mother and American father, Plummer’s debut collection of short stories, The Bolero of Andi Rowe, won the prestigious Miguel Marmól Prize. Her dreamlike yet sharply detailed prose brings to life the intertwined lives of young women caught between the expectations of others and their romantic dreams. In light of the caveat above, that’s all I’ll say, except find the book and judge for yourself. Plummer grew up in South El Monte, California and attended the University of Notre Dame and the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC. She is a fellow of the Macondo Foundation, an association of socially engaged writers, and an Editor at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, where she acquires fiction and nonfiction, especially crime fiction and women's fiction. She lives in Brooklyn.

Here is the link for Plummer’s book.

This Friday, the Literary Mystery Writers series will continue with an interview with Sandra Parshall. Next week, the Writers of Color series will be back with Luis Alberto Urrea, Anastasia Tolbert, and Rich Yañez. I hope you’re all finding some good reading here. Till Friday.

Books of Interest by Writers of Color--Linda Hogan's Rounding the Human Corners

This is a review of mine that first appeared in Galatea Resurrects. This is a wonderful online review magazine/blog focused solely on poetry that often looks at books that aren't reviewed anywhere else, including poets of color. Here's the link to check it out.

And as usual, Blogger has double-spaced the poetry and won't let me put it right. Sigh.

Rounding the Human Corners: Poems by Linda Hogan (Coffee House Press, 2008)

Rounding the Human Corners demonstrates just why Linda Hogan is considered a major American writer. Its visionary imagery and lyrical language are only part of the reason Jim Harrison calls her “a significant figure in our literature,” and William Kittredge in his introduction calls her “one of those singular poets,” saying she offers us “Solace come through apprehending the material and holy world precisely as it is.”

Past winner of the American Book Award, Colorado Book Award, and Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, as well as a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist and essayist, but she is also a dedicated volunteer and consultant for wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs. As such she writes often with the naturalist’s eye, the way she does in “The Heron” about her efforts to rescue an injured heron, which ends with:

“You could kill me or help me.

I know you and I have no choice

but to give myself up

and in whatever supremacy of this moment,

hold your human hand

with my bent claws.

In “Moving the Woodpile,” which could be her manifesto, she begins with “Never am I careless,/ yet when I lift the wood/ …the bark falls from the log…” as she tells of dislodging a wasps’ nest full of pupas and being unable to restore it to the disturbed wasp parents circling just out of reach, no matter how she tries.

“Maybe our sin is not enough

of us get on our knees and ever see

how everything small and nearly gone

is precious, the paper wasp nest,

made by the moment-by-moment creation of care.

… I’ve always wished

to hold the truly stolen, broken world together

but my every move is to break

by degrees, acres, even the smallest atom. ”

That sensibility of the naturalist and consultant on endangered species is also apparent in “The Night Constant,” where she writes of the lion that circles around and walks near her house at night.

..and we don’t even know

the animals that walk outside our sleep

yet we have traveled there so often

there are not so many of them now

where light falls across the hunting ground

we call a world that’s small

because we’ve matched it to ourselves.”

Though Rounding the Human Corners is suffused with this love and concern for the natural wild world and breathtakingly precise descriptions of it, the book lives up to its title in its constant concern with what it is to be truly human, what humans have given up of themselves in the process of damaging the world as they have, and how we can learn to be truly human, yet truly at home in and at one with the natural world around us. The second poem in the book and first in the section titled “Unlayering the Human,” “The Way In” is a small jewel of a poem that will, I think, be one of those rare poems that live on through the generations, the kind that takes your breath away with its music and its truth. “Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body,” it begins, before listing other ways and continuing with “…there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,/ and beauty…” Then she speaks of transformation: stone by water, hard earth by unfolding plant, dry fuel by fire. When she ends with “To enter life, be food,” the truth and pain of those words that humans have fought against and been a part of since their first appearance on this planet reverberates deep within the reader.

Yet Hogan always offers hope. “I know fear has come down to us/ from the first universe/ where the beginnings of stars are never tame,” she tells her granddaughter when asked if she is afraid, but she reminds the reader, “Paradise has always been just out of sight,” and “It may be, it may one day be/ this is a world haunted by happiness…/ …remember there is always something/ besides our own misery.” She urges us again and again to learn from and make our peace with the mysteries of the body, because “…the body remembers the fine animal/ that was lost/ some place in time.”

Sexuality is one of the key ways she highlights our pathway to this wholeness through the body. In “Mysteries of the Bed,” she points out that “Even in the coldest heart,/ we are mostly tender here…” The holy places of the body, she says, “…are the ones with the power/ of gentling the human.” Drawing on her Native American heritage, she encourages us to “…remember the forgotten language wild,/can you still call it?” Hogan can, and she is generous enough to share it with the rest of us, calling to us to join her in her intoxication with the beauty and power of the natural world. Still, she never makes this offer from some superior position, but from the humble place of one who has had to learn these truths in painful ways but counts them worth the cost. Instead she tells us, “I am still a beginner in this world/ without a hold, without money or love or tools./ I am down on my knees./ Maybe now I can begin to learn something.”

Totally accessible as these poems are, this is a book that repays repeated rereading, in fact, almost demands it, because there are new treasures to be found in each poem every time you come to them. It is a major work by a major American writer.

Here's the link to Coffee House Press for her book. Small presses like Coffee House bring most of the writing by people of color to the world. Please patronize them.

This Friday, the series on Literary Mystery Writers begins, and next week, Writers of Color will feature Virgil Suarez, Sebha Sarwa, and Toni Margarita Plummer.

Auspicious Beginnings

I plan to use this blog to discuss writing, my own and that of others, but I also want to look at society and politics. I’m, of course, not a member of the art-for-art’s-sake-only-and-if-it-has-something-to-say-it’s-no-good party. As I said at the opening program of The Writers Place in 1992, we as writers have a responsibility to show our society both the what-is that’s going wrong and the what-could-be that would make things right. We are the torch-bearers who must point out the dangers and light the way into a better future. Even in poems about “little” everyday things.

Enough of that for now. I’m a happy woman as I begin this blog. We’ve just inaugurated a new president, and I believe that Barack Obama is the right person at the right time for the United States. More hope on the political front than I’ve had for many years. (Though, of course, that’s not true since I always hope. I’m the Queen of Hope. Hope is life = my mantra.) Also, I just had a call from the Missouri Arts Council and it looks as if the two major grants I just wrote and turned in for comments will probably be funded. That means that the Latino Writers Collective will have an even bigger, more ambitious reading series to follow this year’s. My book, Heart’s Migration, is beautifully designed and typeset and has a gorgeous cover. Many thanks to my great publisher, Luis J. Rodriguez (no relation) of Tia Chucha Press and his great designer, Jane Brunette. Most of all, Virgil Suarez has just sent a lovely blurb for the cover of the book.

Heart's Migration by Linda Rodriguez is a generous, gorgeous book of poetry. It's the kind of beautiful book that comes along every once in a long while, to keep the reader the perfect company. It's courageous, unflinching in its voice and tradition. You read a poem the likes of "My Daughter's Nightmares," and you feel the pangs of familial love and responsibility. Rather quickly at the start of this book you feel like you are invited in, taken into a landscape of vivid image and memorable detail, such is the vibrant tapestry of this book. This is a gifted, capable poet who takes pride in making a lasting human connection. I praise her voice and her passion!

Virgil Suarez, author of 90 Miles: New & Selected Poems, University of Pittsburg Press.

I’m happy that this will go on my book cover and, we hope, convince reviewers and potential buyers to give it a try. But most of all, I’m happy because I respect Virgil as a wonderful poet himself, so just knowing that he liked my work this much sends me flying. It’s much the way I felt after reading on Luis’ blog “the phenomenal poetry of Linda Rodriguez.” Because aside from his work as publisher, community developer and anti-gang activist, Luis is a great writer himself. However, since he’s publishing the book, he’s got a vested interest of sorts.

Anyway, much to be happy about in my universe. I have a loving husband and terrific kids, and I do believe that 2009 is going to be my year!

Queen of Hope, remember?