Songs for the Land-Bound

by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s luminous debut seeks out ways of coping in a complicated age. Exploring the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability, these poems speak to the persistence of nature, creativity, and love: necessary sources of hope and beauty, the ties that bind us to this shared and sacred place. Here is a lyrical and resonant new songbook for survival, a flight across the uneasy darkness, a shining course through the “wreckage strung with violets.”

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

Published September 24, 2024

About the author

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban wildlife photographer. She is the author of Songs for the Land-Bound (June Road Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow University. Violeta lives with her husband, children, and pack of rescue dogs on a small certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I might be a sucker for nature poetry, but add in themes of motherhood, existing in these times, religious tension, and I’m sold. This book is a treasure! I tabbed so many pages. You don’t have to be a parent to appreciate this one, but I do think there is a special undercurrent of “you aren’t alone” for all the mamas out there. It deserves all the stars.

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poems from Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s book are:

* Parable Of The Swallows
* Dear Deserter, Dear Disaster
* Song Of Past Selves
* Ode To Unmown Grass
* Common Starling
* Cento Drawn From Conversations With My Daughter
* Lockdown Minecraft
* God In The Children’s Hospital
* Insomnia
* Talking With My Children About The Afterlife
* Soundscape
* A Skeptic’s Guide To Birdwatching

These poems in particular resonate with me the most. From the themes of anxiety and worries about family, to the simple moments we take for granted. I thoroughly love this book of poems.

[Lydia Renfro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This breathtaking collection is one of the best poetry books I’ve read in a very long time. I would have read it in one sitting if my dog hadn’t interrupted for a walk! Her line work is beyond beautiful, but the tone and recurrent imagery strike a stunning balance between grief and hope. So many of these poems stayed with me long after the fact, and I was obliged to pause and consider frequently. Resonant, lovely, honest, outstanding. Friends, this is a MUST READ!

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This debut poetry collection, available September 2024, is indeed luminous, as the back cover indicates. Violeta Garcia-Mendoza has a gorgeous command of language as she navigates "the constraints and anxieties of midlife in the midst of climate breakdown, of motherhood in a period of personal and planetary vulnerability."

Here's a brief sample from "Instructions for the At-Home Poet":

Time bares its metal teeth, tick-ticks the list
of what you could or should have done and been.

Once wilder, now the chimney swift will nest
in any of a house’s narrow pockets—

winged things survive on less sky than you think.


While initially cowed by the 108 pages, I was quickly drawn in from beginning to end.

Janet MacFadyen, author of State of Grass, Salmon Poetry 2024

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these gorgeous poems, so deeply rooted in close observation of the natural world but enmeshed, also, in the chaos of domestic family life. I loved the poems listing collective nouns for fathers and mothers; Instructions for the At-Home Poet and Housekeeping Secrets. “Motherhood is an everyday sandbagging,” she writes, with love and clear/eyed understanding. These poems celebrate and grieve, worry and wonder, and bring us, cautiously, to hope.

Here are some passages:

Walking Cure
God, I know I'm too sentimental, but if we could volume-knob panic, let this day dial that doom down.

Decades Later, You Misremember Wildflowers
Childhood is unreliable. Did you imagine it?
Could you not have sworn to being five years old and feeling golden and adrift as pollen?
But why would you have been alone?
But where else would you have learned
to comb the litter-rusted world for hope? No one can tell you.
Maybe it happened like you think.
Maybe you just gathered memories
into a bouquet of shards: glass, plastic, stone, strewn and demolition-dusted.

[Laurel Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The combination of deep joy, exhaustion, overwhelm, and fear that is motherhood is perfectly captured in these poems. The poem "God In The Children's Hospital" slayed me. I also appreciated the juxtaposition of incessant screen time with images of the natural world as a great description of life in the Anthropocene. Highly recommend!

[Abbie Kiefer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her first full-length collection, Garcia-Mendoza gives tender attention to parenthood, illness, the natural world. These are poems of heartbreak and also poems of praise, each carefully crafted. "Call it // music, all of it," she writes, and I agree.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the images, sounds, line-breaks, formal variety, the flow, the sequence, and, and, and of these poems! There is such a unity in the multi-facetted shimmer of this collection.

[Natalie Homer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Songs for the Land-bound has a special sort of calming, suburban atmosphere which acknowledges our locality and yet isn’t afraid to contemplate the infinite. Children, chores, walks through the neighborhood, but also hospitals, songbirds, persona poems from the point of view of Noah’s wife, and meditations on God.

I particularly like collections with strong roots in a place and this is very much a Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania-based collection, which gives it a certain slant of (gray) light.

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poet, wife, and mother Violeta Garcia-Mendoza confesses that she is a clock “set to the needs of others” but in her collection, Songs for the Land-Bound, we find her, more often than not, fine-tuning her practice of being wonderstruck and wilding the world with her words. She may be house bound in “a mussed splendor” with three children but her attention to nature, including the human body, never flags. While she does not deny the “pinging of pain” or the “dark side of belief”— and sees the precariousness of life on our planet—she softens her direct view with descriptors: “delicate shadows” and “nested bones.” The speaker of one poem turns inescapable worry about a child under anesthesia into wondering, where do you go when going under anesthesia? Another manages the daily assault of testing and treating diabetes by daring the disease to “alarm into birdsong.” Garcia-Mendoza has her poet’s ear pricked to the wind and her unflinching eye to a microscope that magnifies the world.
—Lynne Mijangos

[Catherine Madjaric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This stunning book is a must read! The imagery is in turns beautiful and thought provoking. Garcia-Mendoza takes the tiny moments of life and coping and views them as still-frames that are so easily missed in the hurry of illness, life, parenting, and worry. This book is inspiring and puts words and feelings to moments of my own life that I find hard to describe. I will be returning to it frequently for comfort and inspiration and understanding.