Meditación Fronteriza

Again, healer, teacher, foremother Norma Cantú stitches together the art of documentation. Here, she weaves together mediations on the literal/spiritual/intellectual/metaphorical borderlands. A gathering of love poems carving a space to grieve and to celebrate, these poems honor the land, the people in it, and women’s bodies in bloom and in decay in all the places we exist and in all our forms—algebra teachers and poets and pecan shellers and lovers. Like the tendrils of a vine, each poem sprouts its own delicate truth.’—Laurie Ann Guerrero

‘Norma Cantú offers us a prescient and poignant sweep of la fronteriza. These are poems celebrating border life in song, hushed ruminations, elegant verse. Cantú’s offering is one that gives us hope and strength in the midst of difficult times.’—Amelia M. L. Montes  

‘In this extraordinary first collection of poetry, Norma Cantú joins forces with descendants of Aztec scribes who are writing the ‘new codex’ of the borderlands. ‘Here they buried my afterbirth,’ she writes, in the land of her ancestors where ‘I shall remain until the hour of my death.’ Cantú’s fierce connection to the land gives rise to a poetry of witness, visionary in its evocation of landscapes, immigrant journeys, and women’s lives and loves. In an eerily prescient poem, she writes, ‘But the wall went up, / and hardly anyone noticed.’ Thankfully, nothing is lost on Cantú. She is ever attuned to life along a line that both tears us apart and draws us together. Each poem is a little miracle, an invitation to walk through walls, to find our voices, and to write our own songs of the borderlands.’—Demetria Martinez