In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ø Lorna Dee Cervantes 472 “In the Country of My Dreams” praises poet Khalil Gibran and musician Marcel Khalife for playing heroic roles in Lebanese culture, and it honors the beauty of the Lebanese nation. The poem also laments the violence and war that have periodically plagued Lebanon since 1975. Viewing Gibran and Khalife as countervailing forces who “keep us alive,” the poem implicitly protests the prosecution of Khalife by Lebanese authorities in both 1996 and 1999 (and again in 2003, after this poem was written). Khalife, who faced up to three years in prison, was accused of “insulting religious values by using a verse from the chapter of Joseph [Yousef] from the Qur’an in a song.” The accusation concerned Khalife’s well-known song, “I am Joseph, O Father,” based on a poem by Palestinian poet Marhoud Darwish. Defended by human rights organizations, writers, intellectuals, and many ordinary citizens, Khalife was ultimately found innocent. LORNA DEE CERVANTES b. 1954 A leading contemporary poet, lorna dee cervantes writes poems that explore culture, language, and personal experience in complex and imagistic ways. Employing Spanish as well as English, she engages in an intertextual conversation with writers throughout the Americas. Her books bear epigraphs from cultural figures as diverse as Sylvia Plath (included in this anthology), Frida Kahlo (a Mexican visual artist), Violeta Parra (a Chilean poet), and T. S. Eliot (an Anglo-American poet). Although she has overcome economic, ethnic, and gender barriers, the memory of those struggles remains embedded in her work. Her vision encompasses past and present, intellect and feeling, feminism and multiculturalism, local concerns and global awareness. Of mixed Mexican and Native American ancestry, Cervantes grew up with her brother and their single mother in a poor Mexican-American community near San Jose, California. Her mother cleaned houses for a living and brought home discarded books for her daughter to read. Cervantes began writing poems as a child, eventually publishing them in newspapers and magazines, and publishing her first book at twenty-seven. To protect her daughter from discrimination , her mother had forbidden her to speak Spanish as a child, and Cervantes’s poems often reveal her wish to recover her linguistic and cultural legacy. Her poems also reflect the devastation she felt when her mother was brutally murdered in 1982. Cervantes received her B.A. from San Jose State University and did graduate study at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After decades of teaching Freeway 280 Ø 473 in the creative writing program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, she returned to California, where she directs writing workshops in Berkeley and Santa Cruz. Although “a terror of rejection” has limited her publishing to only three books, her poetry has won many awards, including the American Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award. Founded in memory and social observation, Cervantes’s early poems, such as “Freeway 280,” recall childhood landscapes, frustrated desires, and unrecognized moments of joy. Her later poems, such as “Drawings: For John Who Said to Write About True Love” and “For My Ancestors Adobed in the Walls of the Santa Barbara Mission,” reveal a more densely textured, allusive, and wideranging approach. “Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide,” for example, delves into a variety of stories and myths, revealing the cultural fusions that inevitably follow social change. Cervantes’s poems explore social and psychological borders. They alternately focus on love and loss, contemplation and activism, history and language. They create a new cultural vocabulary out of the social rifts and mergings that mark our time. Engaged with the personal life as well as with social realities, Cervantes ’s work aims to construct a new poetic identity and tradition. further reading Cordelia Candelaria. Chicana Poetry: A Critical Introduction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Lorna Dee Cervantes. Blog. http://lornadice.blogspot.com/. — — — —. Drive: The First Quartet. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2006. — — — —. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. — — — —. From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1991. Sonia V. González. “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes.” MELUS 32.1 (Spring 2007): 163–80. Tey Diana Robelledo. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Edith Vasquez. “Poetry as Survival of and Resistance to Genocide in Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Drive: The First Quartet.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 10.4 (May 2009): 290– 300. http://www.bridgew...

Share