Anoranza: Poems

These poems are like short stories packed with emotion, plot, character, and consequence. They evoke small-town, mid-century life with intimate detail, both physical and emotional, capturing moments of girlhood that linger and haunt the memory in later life. Añoranza, (Spanish for yearning or longing) traces the impressions of a small-town girl whose family is dominated by a father’s harsh rule over the household. His spare-the-rod- spoil-the- childphilosophy and “cop” mentality are buffered by the presence of her mother and grandmother—their songs, their strengths, their lessons. Añoranza contains a constellation of themes—faith, death, power, and conflict, which culminate in the author’s discovering a new geography of acceptance and redemption.