Entre Cenizas y Palmas

Do not sleep on these flammable poems. Among the ash and the foliage, Anna Rodas unfolds a gorgeous multilingual, multilayered attack on heteropatriarchal narratives and colonial tropes. As Rodas embarks on her epic journey, no one is safe: she comes for Jesus, Freud, Cinderella, la Virgen, herself, to reckon and to heal. Rodas’ movement between Spanish and English gives birth to a new linguistic realm that delivers exquisite images, brazen possibilities, and a nonbinary understanding of words, sounds, and pronunciations. Her exquisite interrogation of bodies and geographies culminates in a new mythology that refuses, liberates us, from original sin.

-Leticia Hernández-Linares, author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl

In her debut bilingual collection, Anna Rodas offers us sensuous, attentive, and challenging poems. She draws upon women’s emotional and erotic experiences to create a feminist quest for language, and for poetry itself. What is instantly remarkable in Entre Cenizas y Palmas / Between Ashes and Palms is the sharp irony of its imagery and its playfulness. The poet questions established interpretations of sexuality, myths, fairy tales, nationhood, identity, and religion with an irreverent tongue. Merging poetry and prose, Rodas’ poetic corpus includes deeply personal poems, lyric experiments and brief snapshots where the poetic voice appropriates power and opens new cartographies for women.

-Carlota Caulfield, author of A Mapmaker’s Diary

Entre Cenizas y Palmas / Between Ashes and Palms at once conceals and reveals the viscera of a woman on a journey back to her own center. Awakening to the realization of patriarchy’s multiple sites of power, she is on a path to decolonize and reclaim her uterine body from its fractal violence. Elegant motifs and intertextual patterns weave their way effortlessly in and out of our minds: islands, denoting sacred, virgin lands, are punctuated by the arrival or dismissal of unbidden guests; fairy tale archetypes are evoked only to be derided; Catholic iconography and myth stand in as their own liberation theology, one in which the virgin-whore dichotomy collapses and Eve eats an apple a day.

The Latin American literary canon and Indian heritage converge and diverge repeatedly while consolidating the themes of oppression and its resistance: from Draupadi, heroine of the Hindu epic of Mahabharata, who is traded in a dice game, to the Haitian vodou priest, Macandal, who was burned at the stake by French colonists for resisting enslavement—the reader is left intensely dense packages of intertextuality that require an entire reference library to unravel.

Besides the Latin American and Indian imprints that, like strands of DNA, leave forensic evidence of the poet’s influences, the collection is rife with similar opportunities to identify and connect with its author. For example, the words of this carefully cultivated inner sanctum are sparse. Not only is this so because their rhyme and reason is of essence, but because they betray the practical reality of a single mother, stealing the moments to write from the cramped spaces between obligations.

-Samar Habib, author of A Tree Like Rain