A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Guerrero, Laurie Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268010471 ISBN 13: 9780268010478

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013

Synopsis

Filled with the nuanced beauty and complexity of the everyday―a pot of beans, a goat carcass, embroidered linens, a grandfather’s cancer―A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying journeys through the inherited fear of creation and destruction. The histories of South Texas and its people unfold in Laurie Ann Guerrero’s stirring language, including the dehumanization of men and its consequences on women and children. Guerrero’s tongue becomes a palpable border, occupying those liminal spaces that both unite and divide, inviting readers to consider that which is known and unknown: the body. Guerrero explores not just the right, but the ability to speak and fight for oneself, one's children, one's community―in poems that testify how, too often, we fail to see the power reflected in the mirror.

About this title

About the Author:

A native of South Texas, Laurie Ann Guerrero is the author of Babies under the Skin, which won the 2008 Panhandler Publishing Chapbook Award. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in a number of journals. She teaches for the M.F.A. Program at the University of Texas at El Paso, at the University of the Incarnate Word, and at Palo Alto College in San Antonio, Texas.

From Booklist:

The Spanish word for “tongue,” lengua, can be used literally to mean language. Between these complementary senses of the word, Guerrero’s poems locate the life-giving power of verbal expression in the mouths of disenfranchised speakers. Winner of the Andrés Montoya Prize, awarded to first books by Latino and Latina poets, Guerrero finds multifarious forms, images, and metaphors for tongue, be it the literal beef dish, or, figuratively, the cold sweat of a child’s fevered sleep. Elegant multiplicity of meanings unfold, as when a dead calf and the many fathers of a mother’s children complicate notions of husbandry. Centered as it is around hard-working women, Guerrero’s collection resists definition by class and color, even sex. For when she writes of womanhood, the variables of motherhood and marital status force us to see her speakers in their most vulnerable light. Yet these verses of germination and carrying, of labor and production, deliver us to a place of potent ferocity, expressed in multilingual cries, embodied by the wide, red lips of earthenware vessels, and through eyes that refuse to back down. --Diego Báez

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0268010471
• ISBN 13: 9780268010478
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 66