Words or Water

Li Yun Alvarado's poems carve a double-tongued space of longing and resistance, where we can pause to breathe. Read release and renewal in the soft, clear light of her words. Evie Shockley, author of a half-red sea and the new black In Words or Water, Li Yun Alvarado chooses both. This book is simultaneously a meditation and a riptide. External violences from bullets to cancer disrupt our inner worlds. Unconditional love brings us back to center where life regenerates into its full prowess in the nuances of a first and final breath. We are reminded that life is good even when it isn't. Magdalena Gomez, poet, playwright, educator; author of Shameless Woman Li Yun Alvarado's Words or Water is an affective map of the Nuyorican archipelago, as oceanic as it is embodied. In vivid and uncompromising poems-about love and family, about the politics of tweezing and the intricacies of Puerto Rican rum, about the artist Keith Haring's lover Juanito Xtravaganza and the imperialism of Old Navy t-shirts-Alvarado traces the "Atlantic currents" of diaspora while honoring quotidian practices of survival and struggle: "my parents government-cheesed / our lives into normalcy." Women emerge here as counter-genealogical figures (Don Quijote's Dulcinea, the poet Julia de Burgos, who provides an epigraph, mothers and sisters, biological and otherwise) and as guides to a revolutionary knowledge, an affirmation of our bodies even as they are policed and colonized. Urayoan Noel, author of Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisferico and In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam"