ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

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

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

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