This month we are celebrating the titles that we’ve acquired over the past twelve months. Some of them, like the one we’re pleased to present today, came to us by way of Nomadic Press. Read more about our plans to welcome Nomadic Press titles to Black Lawrence Press here. Today we bring you Violeta Orozco, whose forthcoming book Songs Like Talismans will be published next spring.
Have a manuscript you think we’d like? During our June Open Reading Period we are looking for poetry (chapbooks and full-length collections), short fiction (again, both chapbooks and full-length collections), novels, novellas, nonfiction (CNF, biography, cultural studies), anthology proposals, and translations from German.
The Author
An internationally renowned Latina author from Mexico City, Violeta Orozco is a bilingual poet, performer and fiction writer who has earned numerous accolades for her two poetry collections in English: The Broken Woman Diaries, published in Washington State by Andante Books 2022, winner of the Rising Stars Award at the International Latino Book Award; and Stillness in the Land of Speed, published by Jacar Press in 2023, winner of the New Voices Poetry Award and a Pushcart nomination. She has received an honorific mention by the Academy of American Poets, the Juan Felipe Herrera Gold Medal for the best book of poetry in English among other international literary prizes.
Her fiction has received support from the Macondo Writers Workshop in Texas and the writing residency of the Community of Writers of the High Sierra in California. She is a member of the board of Circulo de Poetas and Writers in California and has published individual poems in magazines such as A Gathering of the Tribes, Chicana/Latina Journal, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, Palabritas, Label me Latina, Cloud Women’s Quarterly Journal, Xinachtli Journal, Snarl Journal, IceFloe Press, among many others.
She is currently completing her Ph.D. researching and translating Chicano and Latin American Literature, with a concentration in Creative writing at University of Cincinnati. In Mexico, the national university of Mexico recently published her first non-fiction collection of travel essays in Spanish “Cómo recorrer una ciudad sin despertarla” (UNAM 2023) She is also the translator of Sonia Gutiérrez’ novel Dreaming with Mariposas into Spanish.
On Writing Songs Like Talismans
Songs Like Talismans is a book for diasporic, Latinx and Chicanx readers willing to reimagine our connection to our ancestral lands and to our deepest roots in the Americas. It is a book rising up from the earth, from the rocky realms of volcanoes and oceans, where seashells, corals, obsidian, basalt stones and cacti are still today sacred to many brown and black people in the Americas who seek to record our intimate attachment to this land. Like songs tying us to memory, these objects are talismans of power connecting us to the story of the ecosystems we have inhabited for centuries, the sacred sites where our origin stories are written on our skin. I wrote Songs Like Talismans to map the atlas of an ancient world that still lives in lakes and estuaries, among birds and trees, the world of our cosmic inheritance that for those of us who seek to acknowledge those who stand behind us, is also the direction of our future.
This poetry collection was written in its entirety in Cincinnati, prompted by a trip I made to Serpent Mound in the state of Ohio, one of the last Native American burial sites preserved in the United States. This trip reconnected me to the Xitle volcano in Mexico City, a volcano that buried the Copilco culture where the national university was built in the heart of Mexico City. On their remains, on top of the solidified magma, my alma mater stands. In a way, this book was conceived as an archeological project, where I wrote my own version of indigenous mesoamerican forms of spirituality as understood by a diasporic Mexicana/Chicana writer with roots in the Pacific coast. Each poem seeks to celebrate ancestral practices like song-making, dream-telling and storytelling.
Selections from Songs Like Talismans
CLIFF DIVERS / LOS CLAVADISTAS
Fuel is my hands
recharged by wet, cold, sand
bonfires on warm beaches at the Pacific shore
white crabs shimmer like lit-up ghosts
flicker under dark-pitched waves
tropical summer storms taunt lightning
dip our electric bodies
into shimmering water
the thrill of the forbidden arts
of chasing death
has the panting taste of life
as you scuttle across wet cliffs
nimble crustacean born to roam boulder-lands
jagged bluffs roar and puff in the thrashing water
while we look down from the headland
arms outstretched toward the foam
we pretended we would throw
each other into the black sharp crags
of La Punta Negra
ocean infested with aguamalas and stingrays
you dreamed you would become a diver as brave
as the ones you saw jump off La Quebrada
the great big gulch in Acapulco
sheer cliff walls
gape at your soft breakable body
preparing itself for flight
churning waves wait
like sharks
for the signal of the first blood-
curdling whistle of the race
the narrow space between rock walls
closes in on you
the surge of the water
rises to meet you in midair
you somersault into the sky like a swallow
chest puffed out, arms outstretched, head held high
your torso a blur of rock-colored limbs
plunges as the sun sinks its last rays
into the edge of the coast
blue-white currents
sizzle between the rocks
a turquoise rampage
where four children play
with the wild forces of the earth
their joy an invisible fuel shooting
from their young arms, a lungful of laughter
encompassing
the grace of the very first leap
of the child into the planet
a fish out of water
eyes closed to withstand
the full force of the atmosphere
rush into his bloodstream
like a newfound planet
streaming into our open pores.
HOW I CONTRIBUTED TO THE DESTRUCTION OF MARINE ECOSYSTEMS
Through my window
I watched a mother’s hand
steady her child as she
balanced on the edge of the sidewalk
as if she too had been trained in teetering.
Two times ten the wobbling girl traveled me in time
my naked toes shifted their weight between
wet barnacle-covered rocks on a rugged shoreline
a single false step might have harpooned my spine
my head– a brittle shell– hovered above the surf.
I trusted the sea would not betray me.
The coral reef knew me as well as I knew her
so often I had tributed my blood
to the reef’s rocks, stung by sea urchins,
thick thorns thrusting living spears into my skin
central part of the reefing ritual
skin schooled by jellyfish
electric tentacles tangling their wires
into my nerves, the ocean a network
of connecting cables
anemones dangling tentacles
my fingers making contact
like an astronaut hesitant to leave her suit.
A naked mollusk
I bared my unshelled body to the water
skirted stingrays
flaming fire corals, fierce puffer fish.
I knew
I was not supposed to touch
but this nude hermit crab
came out of my own shell
crawled among rocks
to find a new home for her growing body
shed fear of predators only for an instant
pincers turned to fingers
prodded the seabed, feelers and eyes to find
the direction of the ocean currents
tried to grip the edge of a changing shoreline
where corals crumbled at a child’s touch
whole reef reeling like a single body
suspended between earth and water