The carefully crafted poems in Between the Light / entra la claridad highlight the centrality of family and culture that shape the identities of Mexican Americans, providing them with solid root structures that can also entangle them in the hardships and stereotypes of previous generations. Garza's strong voiced poems push against the outmoded ideas, behaviors, and thoughts that family, culture, and society try to wrap around her, forging her own "path / into the soft ground." This dynamic collection navigates temporal, emotional, linguistic and spiritual borders, borders that we must not ignore in a time when the geographical border demands all our attention, as we seek a space and time when "your ears / don't notice when the tongue speaking to you / slides over, flúido" and "dances where it wishes, map or no."
In In Between the Light / entre la claridad, Elisa A. Garza continues her clear, intelligent exploration of Mexican American identity with poems of family, romance, female power, and landscape. Interweaving English and Spanish, she constructs a spiritual self on the frontier, aware of honoring her origins but blazing a new trail. As she states, "Soy chicana, / a feminine powerful / romantic with baby-ready / arms and kickboxer legs." Here is an original voice not to be missed."--Karen Braugher, author of Aqua Curves and Sending Messages Over Inconceivable Distances
Elisa A. Garza "... raise[s] [her] arms / as if in prayer, as if to hug this sky ..." to speak of many fronteras, geographical and emotional, poetic and pragmatic, calm and full of turmoil. These poems negotiate the space between her mother's experiences of womanhood, motherhood, and relationship, and the life the poet wants a life "... free / of the sharp stones and cactus needles / that stuck her mothers and sisters."
--ire'ne lara silva, author of
Hibiscus Tacos and
furiaPoetry.
