How Long She'LL Last in This World

With this invocation, Maria Melendez beckons us on a journey--an exotic expedition through life's mysteries in search of the finer strands of experience. In a Latina voice laced with a naturalist's sense of wonder, she weaves bold images reflecting a world threaded by unseen wounds, now laid before us with an unflinching love of life and an exquisite precision of language. Adopting multiple guises--field researcher, laboring mother, grief-stricken lover--Melendez casts aside stereotypes and expectations to forge a new language steeped in life and landscape. Whether meditating on a controlled prairie burn or contemplating the turquoise cheek of a fathead minnow, she weaves words and memories into a rich tapestry that resonates with sensual detail and magnifies her sense of maternal wildness, urging us to "Love as much as you /can, don't throw your heart / away to just one god." In her paean to the Aztec deity Tonacacihuatl, mother of the gods, Melendez muses that "How many spirits she's twin to, and how long she'll last in this world, / are secrets stashed in the rattle / of corn ears, in the coils / of venomous snakes." Through stunning images and stark realism, her poems embrace motherhood and vocation, love and grief, land and life, to bring new meaning to the natural world and how we experience it.