Raven Eye

Author Margo Tamez

Written from 13 years of journals, psychic and earthly, this poetry maps an uprising of a borderland indigenous woman battling forces of racism and sexual violence against Native women and children. This lyric collection breaks new ground, skillfully revealing an unseen narrative of resistance on the Mexico–U.S. border. A powerful blend of the oral and long poem, and speaking into the realm of global movements, these poems explore environmental injustice, sexualized violence and indigenous women’s lives.

These complex and necessary themes are at the heart of award-winning poet Margo Tamez’s second book of poetry. Her poems bring forth experiences of a raced and gendered life along the border. Tamez engages the experiences of an indigenous life, refusing labels of Mexican or Native American as social constructs of a colonized people. This book is a challenging cartography of colonialism, poverty and issues of Native identity and demonstrates these as threats to the environment, both ecological and social, in the borderlands. Each poem is crafted as if it were a minute prayer, dense with compassion and unerring optimism.

But the hope that Tamez serves is not blind. In poem after poem, she draws us into a space ruled by mythic symbolism and the ebb and flow of the landscape — a place where comfort is compromised and where we must work to relearn the nature of existence and the value of life.

Bio

Margo Tamez earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from ASU in 1997.


Praise for this book

Some poetry falls readily into categories and schools, but there isn’t yet a poetics to confine Tamez. . . . She is bold and forthright as she maps this world. Her topics range from brutality against women to tender lust, from industrial pollution to hopes for children, but her subject is consistent: the effect of marginalization on people, places, and the planet.

Booklist
Cover of "Raven Eye"
Date published
Publisher
University of Arizona Press
ISBN
978-0816525652

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