Description
Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody.
"Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self. 'We've all cracked/in our own ways,' Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices—missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To experience this collection is to encounter the 'wild self choired, corralled in a thought box,' where 'all of us together/can make a great sound,' a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz's vision—that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA establishes an aesthetic of survival."
Author Bio
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is the fourth Houston Poet Laureate. She is the author of three collections of poetry: BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA (FlowerSong Press, 2020), Fuego (St. Julian Press, 2016), and Nighbloom & Cenote (SJP, 2018), a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky. She is a graduate of The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and earned a bachelor's at Rice University. Her work, including essays and short stories, has appeared in Pleiades, The Missouri Review, [PANK], Iowa Review, Verse Daily, Catapult, and Xicanx: 21 Mexican American Writers of the 21st Century (University of Arizona, 2022), edited by ire'ne lara silva, among others. She has collaborated or been commissioned for poetic projects with the City of Houston, the Houston Grand Opera, and The Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University. Contreras Schwartz was born in Houston, Texas, with Mexican American and Mexican roots going back several generations in Houston and Texas. She is a member of the Macondo Writers' Collective. She has taught at University of Houston and Rice University, teaches community workshops, and is a speaker on the topics of mental health and poetry.
Author City: HOUSTON, TX USA