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Blood Mysteries
Contributor(s): Salazar, Dixie (Author)
ISBN: 0816522375     ISBN-13: 9780816522378
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
OUR PRICE:   $15.26  
Product Type: Paperback
Published: August 2003
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Annotation: Blood Mysteries uncovers the brutality and violence that everyday people experience and the ways in which people heal.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American - Hispanic American
- Poetry | Women Authors
Dewey: 811.54
LCCN: 2002015441
Series: Camino del Sol: A Latina and Latino Literary (Paperback)
Physical Information: 0.28" H x 5.54" W x 8.96" (0.33 lbs) 100 pages
Themes:
- Ethnic Orientation - Hispanic
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
A Jehovah's Witness is stabbed in her home by a stranger she once allowed in. A homeless woman masturbates on a park bench. A statue of the Virgin Mary, "plaster receptacle of petitions and foolish pleas," is found in a dump, a missing hand suggesting the sound of a one-handed rosary.

Through images brutally honest and disarmingly off-center, Dixie Salazar explores the hidden lives of everyday people, objects, and experiences--and their transformation in the hidden realms of the heart. Charting furious descents into the darkest crevices of our souls, Salazar paints for us a lost city that exists below our mundane consciousness. Blood Mysteries is a tribute to lost souls, from a suicidal mental patient who doesn't believe she exists--"melting out of a landscape spotted with shadows, washing her hands in an empty basin of light"--to Marilyn Monroe, victim even in the morgue. In finely tuned lyricism showing an uncanny grasp of frayed lives, she gives flesh and vitality to women normally encountered only as statistics. The incarcerated, the homeless, the hopeless. Missing young girls who turn up violated and murdered.

Salazar presents us with blood mysteries not only of women, but of family as well. In poems invoking her dual heritage, she explores the identity crises brought on by having a Spanish father and a mother from the deep South, leaving her a product of American meltdown with a predisposition to check "other" for race on applications. "Other can be a place," she reminds us, "a residence for those of us without / papers, where halos of lightning bugs / swarm the rickety family tree." Salazar writes with toughness and grit "for all the shipwrecked saints / and wretches among us." But beneath the surface of words sometimes gritty, sometimes playful, lies a testament to the power of empathy, giving voice to those whose voices have been stifled and offering hope for those who have found none. Blood Mysteries is a forceful prayer for the disenfranchised that offers not merely hope, but transcendence.