Emplumada

by Lorna Dee Cervantes

Overview

Emplumada is Lorna Dee Cervantes’s first book, a collection of poems remarkable for their surface clarity, precision of image, and emotional urgency.  Rooted in her Chicana heritage, these poems illuminate the American experience of the last quarter century and, at a time when much of what is merely fashionable in American poetry is recondite and exclusive, Cervantes has the ability to speak to and for a large audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822979869
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/15/1982
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	543 KB

About the Author

Lorna Dee Cervantes is the author of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Loveand Hunger and Emplumada, which won an American Book Award. She is also co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal, and her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets, and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties. In 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

Table of Contents

Contents I Uncle's First Rabbit Cannery Town In August The Anthill Lots: I Lots: II Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway For Edward Long For Virginia Chavez Crow Communication Caribou Girl II The Prayer Pressed Between the Waves Four Portraits of Fire Starfish In January Spiders From Where We Sit: Corpus Christi An Interpretation of Dinner by the Uninvited Guest Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe In the War Between Races To My Brother Freeway 280 Barco De Refugiados Refugee Ship Poema Para Los Californios Muertos Oaxaca, 1974 Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium In Port Townsend, Washington III This Morning Cafe Solo Beetles For All You Know Como Lo Siento The Body as Braille Moonwalkers Shells Before You Go For John On the Cape Oranges Emplumada Glossary of Spanish Words and Phrases Pitt Poetry Series

Editorial Reviews

A writer of unusual emotional strength, Cervantes uses the material of her own life to write poems that speak to everyone. . . . For an understanding of personal courage, it’s a great book. Cervantes’ command of her art is exciting, and her ability to draw the reader in is sure. What I wanted to do after finishing Emplumada was to read more work by this author: let this be the beginning of a beautiful career.”
—The New Woman’s Times Feminist Review


“No book before Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Emplumada has so completely and sharply drawn the East Bay and San Jose, California experience with full justice. No book has so successfully made the Californian urban and rural worlds of unfinished freeways and ‘spinached specked shoes’ of cannery workers come alive. No book has so carefully elucidated what living as a Chicana in the West means, and how ‘an intelligent, well-read person could believe in the war between races.’ Emplumada offers a number of troubled and delicated portrait of a woman’s world and how that antipatriarchal world has come to have meaning.”
—Revista Chicano-Riquena


“Cervantes' first collection is an extremely mature book. The poems are lyrical and well crafted; images recur and build upon one another as the book progresses. Personal but never confessional, she holds emotion in check.”
—Library Journal


“A brilliant first collection of poems by this leading Chicana poet. Sensuous and lyrical, she also sings of the heartbreak of injustice.”
—Midwest Distributors Catalogue


“The strength of Emplumada is the impact of a collection presenting the Chicana and the nature of her coming of age. . . . In Cervantes we have a talented woman who dares to tell us about her struggle to achieve her identity in a world hostile to her attainment of it. . . . The importance of the poems collected in Emplumada is their presentation of the emerging identity of a particular Chicana.”
—Open Places


“Real feelings –– not merely manufactured effects –– mark the first book of the promising young Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes. She creates many scenes of dramatic intensity, made all the more powerful by her wise use of understatement. . . . [T]he poet allows neither propaganda nor self-pity to mar her well-constructed verses, whose moving core of universal human experience transcends their ethnic origins.”
—Booklist

From the Publisher