My Book of the Dead: New Poems
For more than thirty years, Ana Castillo has been mesmerizing and inspiring readers from all over the world with her passionate and fiery poetry and prose. Now the original Xicanista is back to her first literary love, poetry, and to interrogating the social and political upheaval the world has seen over the last decade. Angry and sad, playful and wise, Castillo delves into the bitter side of our world--the environmental crisis, COVID-19, ongoing systemic racism and violence, children in detention camps, and the Trump presidency--and emerges stronger from exploring these troubling affairs of today. Drawings by Castillo created over the past five years are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. My Book of the Dead is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.
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Ana Castillo is a celebrated poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator, and scholar. Born and raised in Chicago, her award winning, bestselling titles include the novels So Far from God, The Guardians, Peel My Love like an Onion, and Sapogonia, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and the poetry collection I Ask the Impossible. She has received numerous awards, including the 2018 PEN Oakland Lifetime Achievement Award, the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement, and was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
In My Book of the Dead you do not delve into the sweet hereafter as if in a level of Dante's Hell, but into the mystical, magical realism breathing life into the quiescence of the everlasting moment of the here and now, caught up in the impossible duende of a poet whose every palabra celebrates and embraces la vida. The Egyptians may have had Osiris, but we have Ana Castillo and her honey for Oshun.--Tony Medina, author of Death, With Occasional Smiling
These are poems that will immerse you in the various rhythms of life and death--while also reminding us of the rage, joys, sorrows, desires, and dolores of both.--Francisco J. Galarte, author of Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies
Ana Castillo offers us the consolations of poetry in the face of current crises of incipient neofascism, entrenched racism, surveillance states, financial inequality, and precarity. . . I am awed by the scale, depths, stretches, bilingual inflections, and powerful ironies of her words that are more necessary than ever in our traumatized world.--Azade Seyhan, author of Heinrich Heine and the World Literary Map: Redressing the Canon
