In an Angry Season Contributor(s): Chávez, Lisa D. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0816521522 ISBN-13: 9780816521524 Publisher: University of Arizona Press OUR PRICE: $15.26 Product Type: Paperback Published: July 2001 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Poetry | American - Hispanic American - Poetry | Women Authors |
Dewey: 811.6 |
LCCN: 2001000485 |
Series: Camino del Sol: A Latina and Latino Literary (Paperback) |
Physical Information: 0.33" H x 6.14" W x 9.02" (0.41 lbs) 103 pages |
Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - Hispanic - Ethnic Orientation - Latino - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: A white woman navigates her fear and uncertainty to learn the ways of the people she called savages, until she begins to dream "in Dakota, syllables sliding / on my tongue like tender pieces of meat." An African man, on display as a cannibal at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, sees into the future: "humiliations heaped up / as on overfilled plates . . . / . . . a country that casually / consumes its own." A woman holds the gray-blue barrel of a gun in her mouth, "the taste familiar / as her own blood." With an unexcelled command of narrative verse, Lisa Ch vez tells the stories of American lives across more than a century. Whether retelling nineteenth-century captivity narratives or depicting contemporary American women confronting addiction and despair, Ch vez investigates issues of identity and self-definition in the face of an often harsh and unremitting history. Her story-poems explore the ways in which people have been made captive--whether to racism or national policy, to bad marriages or alcoholism, to poverty or emotion--from the Inuit woman birthing a son among strangers to the wife now deranged by desire for another man: "He's the smoky slow-burn of chipotle on the tongue. My golden idol. My gospel revival. He's hashish sweet and languorous--my body's one desire." In the end, Ch vez shows us a New World of promise in which an alchemist's assistant summons stories from stones by calling their names with "clicks of her tongue, / syllables of silver, turquoise, and jade," and a Native woman discovers her true power in an Alaskan bar. Passionate and political, In an Angry Season is a work of startling depth and breadth--an American history in poetry--that asks us what it means to be civilized. |