[09/24/24] Garcia-Mendoza, Violeta: Songs for the Land-Bound

June Road Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 24, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Violeta Garcia-Mendoza's luminous debut seeks out ways of coping in a complicated age. Exploring the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability, these poems speak to the persistence of nature, creativity, and love: necessary sources of hope and beauty, the ties that bind us to this shared and sacred place. Here is a lyrical and resonant new songbook for survival, a flight across the uneasy darkness, a shining course through the "wreckage strung with violets." Time bares its metal teeth, tick-ticks the list of what you could or should have done and been. Once wilder, now the chimney swift will nest in any of a house's narrow pockets— winged things survive on less sky than you think.