For more than thirty years, Ana Castillo has been mesmerizing and inspiring readers from all over the world with her passionate and fiery poetry and prose. Now the original Xicanista is back to her first literary love, poetry, and to interrogating the social and political upheaval the world has seen over the last decade. Angry and sad, playful and wise, Castillo delves into the bitter side of our world—the environmental crisis, COVID-19, ongoing systemic racism and violence, children in detention camps, and the Trump presidency—and emerges stronger from exploring these troubling affairs of today. Drawings by Castillo created over the past five years are featured throughout the collection and further showcase her connection to her work as both a writer and a visual artist. My Book of the Dead is a remarkable collection that features a poet at the height of her craft.
She's got a lot to tackle--the Trump era, the border crisis, environmental threats, racially motivated violence--but these declarative, crackling poems confront their subjects with wit and grace, in English and Spanish.--Molly Boyle and Kate Nelson, New Mexico Magazine
With a sharp eye and even sharper wordplay, the poems radiate with emotion, from anger to heartbreak. . . . My Book of the Dead is a striking poetry collection that honors the lost, both known and unknown.--Dontaná McPherson-Joseph, Foreword Reviews
With a sharp eye and even sharper wordplay, the poems radiate with emotion, from anger to heartbreak. . . . My Book of the Dead is a striking poetry collection that honors the lost, both known and unknown.--Dontaná McPherson-Joseph, Foreword Reviews
Ana Castillo offers us the consolations of poetry in the face of current crises of incipient neofascism, entrenched racism, surveillance states, financial inequality, and precarity. . . I am awed by the scale, depths, stretches, bilingual inflections, and powerful ironies of her words that are more necessary than ever in our traumatized world.--Azade Seyhan, author of Heinrich Heine and the World Literary Map: Redressing the Canon
