Description
Amazing New Collection from Poet, Aaron Abeyta.
The poems and prose in Aaron Abeyta's powerful new collection rise directly from the land of his home in the high desert of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado where his family has farmed for many generations. In, A Letter To Pratt In Praise of Books, Abeyta says, "Perhaps we are all here to trace and collect words, to sow meaning; we collect that thing which people discard as ordinary and bring it to a page of life where it can flourish and be the map of human struggle and therefore an instruction as to how we can all survive." Through difficulty, heartbreak and exultant moments Abeyta find language as the road ahead. The compassion and understanding Abeyta has for the people and places in his life comes through clear, wonderful, filled with hard-earned strength and the helpless urge to carry on - with hope. As he says further in his Letter to Pratt... "Language is my wife’s love of living and remembered things, language is my mother’s hands or my father’s tired back, language is my daughter’s smile, the medicine of it after I believed that parts of me were broken forever. Language is water that carries me simultaneously forward and into the past."
"There is no other voice that conjures the sky and keeps count of stars as human migrations, moving, fading, and bursting anew as Abeyta's. Here he is standing naked and alone on the abandoned snowdrifts and tierras, holding them as fallen angels and stellar evidence of our birthright — the luminous lands we claimed we would honor thirty-five years ago. Abeyta speaks with the voices of Nazim Hikmet, Jim Sagel, Allison Hedge-Coke and Albert Hunter, all lovers of the small earth and its colossal heart."
— Juan Felipe Herrera, former United States Poet Laureate
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Hybrid. Latinx Studies.
Author Bio
Aaron A. Abeyta is a Colorado native and the author of four collections of poetry and one novel. For his book, colcha, Abeyta received an American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. In addition, his novel, Rise, Do Not be Afraid, was a finalist for the 2007 Colorado Book Award and El Premio Aztlan. Abeyta was awarded a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for poetry, and he is the former Poet Laureate of Colorado's Western Slope and was a finalist for the 2019 Colorado Poet Laureate. Abeyta is also a recipient of a Governor's Creative Leadership Award for 2017. Aaron has over 100 publications including 'Wildness, Relations of People and Place 'An Introduction to Poetry, 10th ed.,' Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, & Drama, 8th ed.' 'Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, & Culture' 'The Leopold Outlook' 'Colorado Central Magazine' 'The High Country News' and numerous other anthologies and journals. Abeyta also served as mayor of his hometown, Antonito, for eight years, completing his two terms in April, 2022. Aaron, his wife Michele and their daughter, Rut, call Antonito home. Michele and Aaron are co-Directors and founders of The Justice & Heritage Academy, a school based on the three pillars of Environmental, Social, and Food Justice.
Author City: ANTONITO, CO USA