Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book is about Latina identity, a timely subject in today's America. The author's journey begins as she, full of love for Mexico and its culture despite her closest blood connection being her bisabuela, boards a bus. She starts out determined: "Yes foreign is a word for fear. Yes I am coming home." But then, because "it is afraid, staying in a language where you were not born," she retreats, hiding first behind we, then behind masks. But when it becomes clear that the masks are her true self, she loses her fear, and barrels ahead as I, fully committed, all the way to the end.
Story Line Press was created in 1985 by Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman, two young poets who wanted to create a home for new work that might not be published by mainstream commercial or academic presses. Story Line soon gained an international reputation as an independent-minded press that championed narrative and formal poetry, innovative anthologies, and criticism written in a public voice rather than academic style. The press also had a strong allegiance to West Coast writers. Despite its limited resources, Story Line became one of the most influential literary presses of the era publishing a mix of new and established writers including Donald Justice, Rita Dove, Christian Wiman, Donald Hall, David Mason, Amy Uyematsu, and Weldon Kees.
Synopsis
"Lola Haskins's range is broad; her perceptions are always surprising. Natural objects surpass themselves and episodes of women's history are rewritten in this lively, adventuresome collection."
--Maxine Kumin
" . . . Hunger is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It's a wonder."
--Beloit Poetry Journal
"She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for the stars. . . . And she's wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling."
--Northwest Arkansas Times
" The poems] richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles. . . wonderfully evocative."
--The Hudson Review
". . . Convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling. . . . It is the clarity of Haskins's poems and (her speakers') observations, combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact."
--Colorado Review