Background
A scholar, poet, and Indigenous rights defender, Tamez grew up in unceded Lipan Apache territory in South Texas, the Lower Rio Grande Valley and along the Texas-Mexico border.
( Written from thirteen years of journals, psychic and ea...)
Written from thirteen years of journals, psychic and earthly, this poetry maps an uprising of a borderland indigenous woman battling forces of racism and sexual violence against Native women and children. This lyric collection breaks new ground, skillfully revealing an unseen narrative of resistance on the Mexico–U.S. border. A powerful blend of the oral and long poem, and speaking into the realm of global movements, these poems explore environmental injustice, sexualized violence, and indigenous women’s lives. These complex and necessary themes are at the heart of award-winning poet Margo Tamez’s second book of poetry. Her poems bring forth experiences of a raced and gendered life along the border. Tamez engages the experiences of an indigenous life, refusing labels of Mexican or Native American as social constructs of a colonized people. This book is a challenging cartography of colonialism, poverty, and issues of Native identity and demonstrates these as threats to the environment, both ecological and social, in the borderlands. Each poem is crafted as if it were a minute prayer, dense with compassion and unerring optimism. But the hope that Tamez serves is not blind. In poem after poem, she draws us into a space ruled by mythic symbolism and the ebb and flow of the landscape—a place where comfort is compromised and where we must work to relearn the nature of existence and the value of life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081652565X/?tag=2022091-20
( Come, step outside your human skin for just a little wh...)
Come, step outside your human skin for just a little while. Margo Tamez's voice is that of the cicada and the cricket, the raven and the crane. In this volume of poetry, she shows us that the earth is an erotic current linking all beings, a vibrant network of birth, death, and rebirth. A sacred intertwining from which we as humans have become disconnected. Tamez shares the perspective of other creatures in images that remind us of Nature's beauty and fragility. An invocation of birds: "Sudden hum / wings touching / wings in swift turn / hush / a fast red out of the flux." An appreciation for the delicacy of insects, for spiderwebs "like a hundred needle-thin tubes of blown glass." Here too are reflections on childbirth and children—and on miscarriage, when damage inflicted on the environment by herbicides comes back to haunt all of us in our skin and bones, our very wombs. Warning of "the chemical cocktail seeping into the air ducts," she brings the voice of someone who has experienced firsthand what happens when our land and water are compromised. For Margo Tamez, earth, food, and family are the essentials of life, and we ignore them at our own peril. "If a person / does not admit the peril . . . that becomes a dangerous / form of existence." Written with the wisdom of one who knows and loves the land, her lyrical meditations speak to the naked wanting in us all.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816522480/?tag=2022091-20
A scholar, poet, and Indigenous rights defender, Tamez grew up in unceded Lipan Apache territory in South Texas, the Lower Rio Grande Valley and along the Texas-Mexico border.
Tamez"s 2007 work, Raven Eye, is considered the first Apache-authored literary work which "indigenized" the American poetry form known as the "long poem", a form developed by Norman Dubie. In Raven Eye, Tamez drew from Athabaskan and Nahua creation stories, oral tradition, and Lipan Apache genocide narratives in combination with autobiography. Raven Eye connected the Lipan Apache oral narrative structure from the Lower Rio Grande valley and southern Texas to a literary aesthetic form that included pictorial writing and history of resistance.
Her poetry is best known for stark, detailed examinations of gender violence, identity, non-recognition, genocide and spaces of abjection (walls, the camp, death march, exile).
Her prose reflects the critical views of processes and on-going effects of fragmentation, historical erasure, and dispossession on Indigenous peoples, making crucial links between history and present forces (colonization, militarization) impacting Indigenous self-determination in regions bifurcated by settler nation borders where those who remained in traditional places were largely ignored by the state.
( Written from thirteen years of journals, psychic and ea...)
( Come, step outside your human skin for just a little wh...)
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