Duende De Burque

At its center, Duende de Burque is a love letter to Alburquerque and its surroundings--the Sandia Mountains, the Rio Grande Bosque, and all the people whose spirits fill these spaces. It is an exploration of one poet's search for duende, that elusive state of spontaneous expression and authenticity. With a debut in local poetry slam, Manuel González has honed his craft on the stage and on the page for the past twenty years. He has represented Burque several times on the national slam scene, hosted countless slams for people of all ages, and worked to help adults and youths discover the power of self-expression. In this collection, González writes about his beginnings as a poet and his work as the third Albuquerque Poet Laureate. He writes about what inspires him and how he works to inspire others and to craft poems that do the same. In his core is Burque--his heart, his sangre, and the home of his ancestors.

Open-Hearted Horizon: An Albuquerque Poetry Anthology invites you into a poetic conversation. The anthology includes a wide range of Albuquerque-based poets and poems that are inspired—directly, associatively, obliquely—by Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a place and as a community. Anthologies commonly celebrate a multitude of voices. Because this one is place-based, we hope you will feel drawn into a circle that deepens your sense of place and people, of contexts and cultures, whether you know Albuquerque or not. Because the Albuquerque poetry community is characterized by its support for individual writers and by a strong impulse toward creative collaboration, Open-Hearted Horizon features poems in multiple voices. In addition to poems by individual poets, this collection also features collaborative works, including those by the EKCO collective and one that features a line from every poem in the anthology. Overall, the collection invites you to experience Albuquerque in all its richness, diversity, and depth.

Written by the "pandemic poet laureate" of Albuquerque, Sidewalk Cruiseship draws on Oishi's remarkable ability to illustrate the world around her and the people in it. Separated into eleven short sections by traditional Japanese tankas, the poems in Oishi's newest collection take on the macro and the micro. They respond to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the contentious political climate as they draw readers in to witness intimate moments of people and scenes within Oishi's beloved city of Albuquerque. The poems explore such themes as mental illness, the joys and sorrows of motherhood, what it is to be a woman in the world, and aging and death. Readers will come away with a better sense of Albuquerque and its inhabitants and will get an intimate look at one of its most passionate citizens--a Japanese American longtime justice activist and mentor for queer youth who embraces the best and worst Albuquerque has to offer. Throughout it all, she reminds us that the best response we can offer is love, even in the face of adversity.

Nestled in the heart of Albuquerque is a vibrant cottonwood forest that has flourished for centuries along the R o Grande--providing a home for porcupines, migratory birds, coyotes, and other wildlife as well as a sanctuary for its city residents. Today, in the midst of climate change and the slow drying of the river, the bosque struggles to remain vibrant. As a former Albuquerque Poet Laureate, Michelle Otero champions this beloved Albuquerque treasure. In her debut poetry collection, Bosque, she celebrates the importance of water and the bosque to the people of Albuquerque. Otero shares her reflections on the high desert--where she is rooted, where she draws her strength, and where she has flourished--and she invites readers to do the same.

The poems collected here insist that with the power to do right, people also have a responsibility to themselves, their loved ones, and complete strangers to be better and strive harder.

The Blood Poems is one part bloodletting, one part healing, and one part sensuous celebration as Jessica Helen Lopez lays out what it means to be a strong brown woman, a single mother, and the kickass bard that the twenty-first century needs. Lopez openly faces a damaging childhood, sex, divorce, and racial injustice in these poems. She proves that love is as complicated as lovemaking--messy and lusty, raucous and powerful, capable of amazing highs and abysmal lows. She proves that when a woman learns to love herself, she will live a fierce and full life and teach her daughters to do the same.

Hilda Raz has long been a significant voice for American poetry. She writes of widows dancing and of squirrels fat in late September, of the power of a woman's voice, solitary, "blessed to be the womb put to use or not." Raz brings to her poetry and all the things it may encompass an authority wrought of compassion, of awareness and hard-won wisdom. She writes, "I bent over the mess, began to gather it up" and this is an apt description for how a life might be crafted into poetry. She knows where poetry comes from, as Yeats did in his "foul rag and bone shop," that "I'm not afraid anymore. / How heavy you were on my body. / How burnt I was from exposure." The reader will remember the triumphs and heartbreaks, where "I lean on rituals of the house. / Is it possible to live forever in silence?" and where a mother, dreaming, . . . sits in the rocking chair. From the shut closet, a cry. In the closet, wrapped in a snowsuit, under the zipper, one of the twins she gave birth to, this child in her arms. One twin died, she remembers, but this one is alive and mewing, a swollen belly, a perfect little head, a face. She'd forgotten him. No. I can fix everything.