MyOTHER TONGUE
MyOTHER TONGUE
Rose Alcalá's new poemario MyOTHER TONGUE begins in the archives of what has yet to be written. She writes with precision and dynamism from the borders between death (of a mother) and birth (of a daughter). What a body produces, and what produces a body: labor, trauma, memory, sacrifice, pain, danger, and language formed both on the tongue and in the culture and the spaces between what can be said and what is missing, the linguistic and existential problem of not having the right words. The darknesses in Alcalá's work emerge from what happens when we don't see ourselves in the languages that both form and destroy us as we labor in this "dream called money." Alcalá is a {un}documentarian of what history and memory try to erase. Her poems are urgent, demanding and haunting. (Daniel Borzutzky, back cover)