Another America / Otro America --by Barbara Kingsolver

 Nonfiction / Poetry

160 pages

5 stars

 

I have read this book twice. I found myself in thrall after the first reading, her poetry stayed with me for years. After this second reading, I found myself amazed at how fresh it was, how relevant to our days and times. I had forgotten so much; I just remembered the beauty of her writing. This time I saw for the first time again the pain, the blood, but still, the beauty.

 

This book speaks of love, of tenderness, of cruelty, of loss. This book speaks of life in all its beauty and its grit, and does so with a poetic elegance accessible to anyone who reads it.

 

Although I do not speak Spanish, I enjoyed having the left-hand page in Spanish, and the right hand page in English. Someday maybe I’ll learn Spanish, and then I can read all the even numbered pages.

 

This time through, I read it in conjunction with another book of poems, also with a great deal of Spanish, but within the poems, Songs Older Than Any Known Singer —by John Phillip Santos. The books blended and complemented each other as if they had been written one for the other.

Songs Older Than Any Known Singer --by John Phillip Santos

 Nonfiction / poetry

129 pages

5 Stars

 

These poems are stories. These poems are memoir. These poems are songs. These poems are beauty. These poems are exquisite art. 

 

This book is to be savored like the most expensive liquor, like the most decadent desert. Unlike said drink and desert, this book can be enjoyed over and over, and has no calories. 

The Farthest Home is where you make it

The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegy –John Phillip Santos

Nonfiction / Memoir

280 pages

5 Stars

When I read his first book, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, I never wanted the book to end. I parsed out the last few pages one or two pages at a time, and then one or two paragraphs until, alas, I reached the fateful words: The End.

This book was only slightly different, I did not parse out the last pages, because I know there is another book by him waiting to be read.

Where Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation was a pretty straight forward memoir of his patrilineal line, The Farthest Home is in an Empire of Fire: A Tejano Elegy is anything but a straightforward memoir of his matrilineal side of the family.

He took chances with this book, and they not only worked, they worked well. He used poetic language—in fact, the whole book may well be one very long prose poem—to weave a tapestry of brilliant colors and subdued shadows of a surreal magical realism as he told the story of his search for his matrilineal roots.

Engrossed right from the beginning, I had a hard time putting this book down. Normally, when people use "foreign" words in a story, it's a turn-off for me. I get the feeling they are trying to show me how intelligent they think they are. This book starts off in Spanish. I do not speak Spanish. But I read, and I recognized the words, and he explains them when they might not be so obvious to a gringa such as I. (We have so many Latin Americans living in my area, that most signs are in Spanish and English—it is amazing what one can learn by reading and observing!)

This is the story of Santos searching for his deep roots, all the way back to Spain, and how he finds them. I loved the people he met along the way, and the story of meeting a cousin and trading his Tony Lama boots for his cousin's ragged farm work boots. They wore the same size.

His mother's family arrived in southern Texas in the 1620s, Santos goes back to Spain and finds the town they were from. He rethinks the way we think about our identity. Wo are we, really? How many generations or years must we be Spanish or Mexican or American or Scottish to call ourselves by one name or another?

This book is history, from an up close and personal perspective. It is memoir. It is told in past, present, and future. It is totally engaging. A read no one should miss.