Adobe Odes
Pat's poetry is the poetry of what she loves—chocolate, books, dandelions, church bells, hope, courage, and even rain. Thick with the microcultures of foodstuffs, family, places, regions, deities, spirits, and literary figures, Mora’s adobe universe is luscious and tactile, elemental and dynamic.
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Agua Santa: Holy Water
Drawing on oral and lyrical traditions, this book honors the grace and spirit of mothers, daughters, lovers, and goddesses. From a tribute to Frida Kahlo to advice from an Aztec goddess, the poems explore the intimate and sacred spaces of borderlands through many voices: a revolutionary, a domestic worker, a widow.
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Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical
Saints
Aunt Carmen, a fictional sacristan now eighty, has cleaned a small
Northern New Mexico church for forty years. She is impatient with
cerebral notions of faith, but she know her saints--their stories, their
sorrows , and their joys. Through her they emerge: El Santo Niño de
Atocha, the mischievous Holy Child; the doting father, San José; and the
bold Santa María Magdalena, whom Aunt Carmen imagines walking into
church "in heels and short skirts." And in Aunt Carmen's prayers to
them, she finds the words to tell her own story.
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Borders
Winner of a Southwest Book Award. In these poems, Mora explores the
political, cultural, social and emotional borders that divide people,
forming their individual identities.
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Chants
El Paso, the pass to the north, lies between vast stretches of
desert. This is a geographic accident. Yet like everywhere, people
live, love, marry, grow old and die. They also rejoice and despair.
These poems relate all these experiences--but in the magical
presence, the teluric force, of the desert. Two women poets sing
here, one in the guise of the desert, the other in the figure of Pat
Mora. Together they intone Chants.
The desert's beauty is perceived in the subtle gradations of
color and texture, in stark contrasts between light and darkness. It
speaks as a magical force, as a lonely woman and, for our patience,
offers flowers. Like the desert, Pat Mora speaks with muted tones,
weaves incantations; she invests her poetic space with magical figures,
yet from her loneliness come as well fear, resentment and despair.
But she learns the peaceful solitude of the desert. From their
dialogue, words become blossoms, fragile in desert rhythms."
--Julián Olivares, Editor
Revista Chicano-Riqueña
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Communion
This third collection builds upon her previous writings and new
experiences to provide a healing voice, additional depth and maturity,
and an international perspective in considering the art of poetry
itself, male/female relationships, separation from children, homeland,
tradition.
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