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Emplumada
Cervantes' first collection is an extremely mature book. The poems are lyrical and well crafted; images recur and build upon one another as the book progresses. Personal but never confessional, she hold emotion in check."--Library Journal
80 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1981
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353 people want to read
About the author
Lorna Dee Cervantes
19 books35 followersA fifth generation Californian of Mexican and Native American (Chumash) heritage, Lorna Dee Cervantes was born on August 6, 1954, in San Francisco, and raised in San José.
She is the author of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press, 1991) and Emplumada (1981), which won an American Book Award.
She is also co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal, and her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1994), No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (ed. Florence Howe, 1993), and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (ed. Ray González, 1992).
In 1977 she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.
She lives in Boulder, Colorado.
[Description from: Poets.org.]
She is the author of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press, 1991) and Emplumada (1981), which won an American Book Award.
She is also co-editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural poetry journal, and her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1994), No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (ed. Florence Howe, 1993), and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (ed. Ray González, 1992).
In 1977 she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.
She lives in Boulder, Colorado.
[Description from: Poets.org.]
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
October 5, 2022
Excerpts:
You tide me and I rise, / and there’s no truth / more simple.
(from “Como lo Siento”)
I was a girl. I was juniper / or magnolia, all violet and rage.
(from “Before You Go”)
You tide me and I rise, / and there’s no truth / more simple.
(from “Como lo Siento”)
I was a girl. I was juniper / or magnolia, all violet and rage.
(from “Before You Go”)
May 26, 2025
Short poetry book, nothing bad, a few memorable poems, but not a collection I particularly enjoyed, hence only three stars. I assume at its publication in 1981 this collection was more unusual and interesting as the number of published Chicano voices was fewer. Valuable borderlands perspective.
January 6, 2023
I wonder at the way
I let you go
without touching
you, wonder
at seagulls, the
danger in their willful
lines—for them
life is nothing
but picking
the coast clean
all they love
is a flicker of bread
or the opening
of another hand
Favorites:
Uncle’s First Rabbit
Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway
For Virginia Chavez
Poema Para los Californios Muertos
Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington
Shells
Before You Go
I let you go
without touching
you, wonder
at seagulls, the
danger in their willful
lines—for them
life is nothing
but picking
the coast clean
all they love
is a flicker of bread
or the opening
of another hand
Favorites:
Uncle’s First Rabbit
Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway
For Virginia Chavez
Poema Para los Californios Muertos
Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington
Shells
Before You Go
July 28, 2025
SHE HATED
AND SHE HATED TO SEE
THEM GO
AND SHE HATED TO SEE
THEM GO
July 29, 2009
This is Cervantes's first collection of poems, published in 1981 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Most critical work about Cervantes focuses on this first collection, in which many of the poems describe Cervantes's experiences growing up in San Jose. Some of her most anthologized work, like "Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races, "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," and "Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington." Most critics choose to understand Cervantes's work as emerging from the historical moment when Chicana writers began to articulate their dissatisfaction with both the women's movement (feminism's second wave) and the Chicano Civil Rights movement. Both groups marginalized Chicana writers and their standpoints.
Cervantes's poetry, which is mostly confessional and semi-autobiographical, often depicts and critiques the various oppressions that she saw around her as she came of age. Yet many of the poems in the book, almost half, are less explicitly "Chicana"--here, I mean Chicana in the sense of covering a certain set of themes (like Aztlan, the Spanish language, etc.). These less political poems deal instead with loss, grief, nature, and death. One of my favorites is called "Starfish." This poem, told in first person, follows a narrator whose fascination with the hundreds of starfish s/he finds on the beach stems from both the loveliness of the specimens as well as their impending death. Cervantes writes: "little martyrs, soldiers, artless suicides/In lifelong liberation from the sea." Cervantes is someone who often gets pigeon-holed as a Chicana poet (a term Cervantes is certainly proud to claim, by the way), but reading her collection in its entirety offers a more expansive understanding of what themes count as "Chicana," and what kind of writing counts as "political." Almost every poem in this collection feels rich with imagery, yet still manages to create a narrative. While these poems read quickly the first time through, many are compelling enough to warrant re-reading and unpacking.
Cervantes's poetry, which is mostly confessional and semi-autobiographical, often depicts and critiques the various oppressions that she saw around her as she came of age. Yet many of the poems in the book, almost half, are less explicitly "Chicana"--here, I mean Chicana in the sense of covering a certain set of themes (like Aztlan, the Spanish language, etc.). These less political poems deal instead with loss, grief, nature, and death. One of my favorites is called "Starfish." This poem, told in first person, follows a narrator whose fascination with the hundreds of starfish s/he finds on the beach stems from both the loveliness of the specimens as well as their impending death. Cervantes writes: "little martyrs, soldiers, artless suicides/In lifelong liberation from the sea." Cervantes is someone who often gets pigeon-holed as a Chicana poet (a term Cervantes is certainly proud to claim, by the way), but reading her collection in its entirety offers a more expansive understanding of what themes count as "Chicana," and what kind of writing counts as "political." Almost every poem in this collection feels rich with imagery, yet still manages to create a narrative. While these poems read quickly the first time through, many are compelling enough to warrant re-reading and unpacking.
June 4, 2021
Poems about social issues are at the heart of Lorna Dee Cervantes’ collection, Emplumada, works that remain just as powerful today as they were when they were written 40 years ago. By “powerful” I mean they are relevant, telling and heartbreaking in the way they lay bare the human experience of the working-class struggle, particularly that of Chicanos in California. Her eyes-wide-open descriptions of the issues of her day—racism, poverty, classism, sexism and abuse—stab slowly at the heart as she pens the lives of real humans on the page for us to see, understand and digest.
We see her subjects clearly, including the awful things that happen to them and how they rise above them—or break. Some grow mean or defiant. Because we see them so clearly, we want the best for them; to see them succeed. Yet in these poems, good too rarely happens. Instead, the stories woven deftly through the poems show us how the world is set against her subjects in ways that are nearly impossible to overcome.
Because these words still resonant so clearly, one realizes with another level of heartbreak that so little has changed in the four decades since these poems were published. Why is social change so difficult? Why have we evolved so little? Perhaps we should call what we’re chasing “social improvement” since humans resist “change” of any kind so diligently.
The vivid details in the first poem in the book, Uncle’s First Rabbit, are among the strongest examples of Cervantes’ storytelling abilities. We follow the uncle as a 10-year-old boy through the Santa Barbara pines as he hunts a rabbit for his father’s supper. He daydreams of selling the rifle to take the first train out of town, far from this hideous deed. Instead, he shoots the rabbit only to be haunted for life by the dying animal’s cries, which to him sound “like a baby.” When his baby sister dies from his drunken father’s kick to the mother’s stomach before birth, it’s his mother who is keening, the act of wailing in grief for a dead person. These themes of violence and regret follow the uncle late into adulthood. His journey in Cervantes’ poem draws dread, grief, anger and sadness from the reader. The emotion feels very real.
The poems should be read slowly to truly savor them in full. It’s like watching a movie where you can’t miss the time on the clock or white daisies surrounding the deceased woman’s head (much less a whole scene) if you want to truly understand the story. These poems are very visual and very detailed, and the details matter.
Abuse and violence is another theme Cervantes takes on in this collection, which won her the American Book Award in 1982. In the poem Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway, we meet the strong yet sometimes broken women in her life, whom she portrays as survivors, queens and warriors. Her grandmother lived “twenty-five years with a man who tried to kill her.” Outside the narrator hears “glass bottles shattering” then, at her bedroom door, a man, “breath full of whiskey” at 3 a.m. calling her name. She reunites with a sweet friend from childhood and finds her with “blood in your eyes, blood in your mouth, blood pushing out of you in purple blossoms. He did this.” As the reader, you see it, you feel it, your heart is pounding.
Some of her poems are gentle odes to love and nature while others paint the San Jose, California neighborhood where she grew up in precisely rendered strokes, the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Chumash father, although, from age 5, she was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother. Like many of her era, she wasn’t taught Spanish as a child, an approach her parents, and many parents, including mine, thought would protect her from the racism of those times, but instead left her feeling adrift in her own identity and culture. In Oaxaca, 1974, she is reviled and discounted in the heart of Mexico for not knowing the language.
I didn’t ask to be brought up tonta!
My name hangs around me like a loose tooth.
The title seems to be a co-joining of two Spanish words, emplumado meaning feathered, as in after molting (and also winged) and plumada, which is the flourish of a pen stroke. This perfectly fits the book. She was 27 when it was published and remains one of Chicano literature’s most beloved and respected poets. Besides the American Book Award, she’s the winner of two Pushcart Prizes, the Patterson Prize for Poetry and many other honors. She’s read at the White House and The Library of Congress. The Chicano poet known as Alturista described her as “probably the best Chicana poet active today.” ✧
We see her subjects clearly, including the awful things that happen to them and how they rise above them—or break. Some grow mean or defiant. Because we see them so clearly, we want the best for them; to see them succeed. Yet in these poems, good too rarely happens. Instead, the stories woven deftly through the poems show us how the world is set against her subjects in ways that are nearly impossible to overcome.
Because these words still resonant so clearly, one realizes with another level of heartbreak that so little has changed in the four decades since these poems were published. Why is social change so difficult? Why have we evolved so little? Perhaps we should call what we’re chasing “social improvement” since humans resist “change” of any kind so diligently.
The vivid details in the first poem in the book, Uncle’s First Rabbit, are among the strongest examples of Cervantes’ storytelling abilities. We follow the uncle as a 10-year-old boy through the Santa Barbara pines as he hunts a rabbit for his father’s supper. He daydreams of selling the rifle to take the first train out of town, far from this hideous deed. Instead, he shoots the rabbit only to be haunted for life by the dying animal’s cries, which to him sound “like a baby.” When his baby sister dies from his drunken father’s kick to the mother’s stomach before birth, it’s his mother who is keening, the act of wailing in grief for a dead person. These themes of violence and regret follow the uncle late into adulthood. His journey in Cervantes’ poem draws dread, grief, anger and sadness from the reader. The emotion feels very real.
The poems should be read slowly to truly savor them in full. It’s like watching a movie where you can’t miss the time on the clock or white daisies surrounding the deceased woman’s head (much less a whole scene) if you want to truly understand the story. These poems are very visual and very detailed, and the details matter.
Abuse and violence is another theme Cervantes takes on in this collection, which won her the American Book Award in 1982. In the poem Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway, we meet the strong yet sometimes broken women in her life, whom she portrays as survivors, queens and warriors. Her grandmother lived “twenty-five years with a man who tried to kill her.” Outside the narrator hears “glass bottles shattering” then, at her bedroom door, a man, “breath full of whiskey” at 3 a.m. calling her name. She reunites with a sweet friend from childhood and finds her with “blood in your eyes, blood in your mouth, blood pushing out of you in purple blossoms. He did this.” As the reader, you see it, you feel it, your heart is pounding.
Some of her poems are gentle odes to love and nature while others paint the San Jose, California neighborhood where she grew up in precisely rendered strokes, the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Chumash father, although, from age 5, she was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother. Like many of her era, she wasn’t taught Spanish as a child, an approach her parents, and many parents, including mine, thought would protect her from the racism of those times, but instead left her feeling adrift in her own identity and culture. In Oaxaca, 1974, she is reviled and discounted in the heart of Mexico for not knowing the language.
I didn’t ask to be brought up tonta!
My name hangs around me like a loose tooth.
The title seems to be a co-joining of two Spanish words, emplumado meaning feathered, as in after molting (and also winged) and plumada, which is the flourish of a pen stroke. This perfectly fits the book. She was 27 when it was published and remains one of Chicano literature’s most beloved and respected poets. Besides the American Book Award, she’s the winner of two Pushcart Prizes, the Patterson Prize for Poetry and many other honors. She’s read at the White House and The Library of Congress. The Chicano poet known as Alturista described her as “probably the best Chicana poet active today.” ✧
September 8, 2019
4.7/5
this was an excellent poetry collection. they all feel like stories and are so full of images and sound so beautiful read aloud. i’m definitely planning on buying and re-reading this collection: i’ve reread many of the poems in this little book and come to love them more and more. i still don’t really know anything about poetry but these are so vivid and powerful and emotive. i saw a reviewer refer to this book as “dark, bloody, revealing poetry” and don’t see anything being more fitting.
my favorite poem in this book is probably “poem for the young white man who asked me how i, an intelligent, well-read person could believe in the war between races.” didn’t quote anything from it but it’s truly phenomenal.
fav poems from this collection:
- uncle’s first rabbit
- lots II
- meeting mescalito at oak hill cemetery
- for virginia chavez
- the prayer pressed between the waves
- spiders
- poem for the young white man who asked me how i, an intelligent, well-read person could believe in the war between races
- this morning
- beetles
- before you go
- for john on the cape
- oranges
- emplumada
5 quotes i loved:
I am driven from this world, alive.
I come to this world, in dreams.
I’m an ugly woman, weedlike,
elbowing my way through the perfect
grass. The best of what I am
is in the gravel behind the train yard
where obsidian chips lodge
in the rocks like beetles
I burrow and glow
I was a girl. I was juniper
or magnolia, all violet and rage
Marmots, foxfire, black
rememberings in the scrub, now
I remember our rusted buckets
as we gathered sour apples
in the winds, your long hair
matting to silver and gold
the shimmer of your teared eyes
gone cold.
Above the calm exterior of roses, spiders bloom
fat with the afternoon buzzings.
They are harmless.
They are keeping the flies
off my back porch.
They have beautiful women drawn on their bodies.
Their legs are ugly
but useful;
look what they leave in the dew. Look.
With our arms holding each other’s waists, we walked the waking streets
back to your empty flat,
ignoring the horns and catcalls behind us, ignoring what
the years had brought between us:
my diploma and the bare bulb
that always lit your bookless room
this was an excellent poetry collection. they all feel like stories and are so full of images and sound so beautiful read aloud. i’m definitely planning on buying and re-reading this collection: i’ve reread many of the poems in this little book and come to love them more and more. i still don’t really know anything about poetry but these are so vivid and powerful and emotive. i saw a reviewer refer to this book as “dark, bloody, revealing poetry” and don’t see anything being more fitting.
my favorite poem in this book is probably “poem for the young white man who asked me how i, an intelligent, well-read person could believe in the war between races.” didn’t quote anything from it but it’s truly phenomenal.
fav poems from this collection:
- uncle’s first rabbit
- lots II
- meeting mescalito at oak hill cemetery
- for virginia chavez
- the prayer pressed between the waves
- spiders
- poem for the young white man who asked me how i, an intelligent, well-read person could believe in the war between races
- this morning
- beetles
- before you go
- for john on the cape
- oranges
- emplumada
5 quotes i loved:
I am driven from this world, alive.
I come to this world, in dreams.
I’m an ugly woman, weedlike,
elbowing my way through the perfect
grass. The best of what I am
is in the gravel behind the train yard
where obsidian chips lodge
in the rocks like beetles
I burrow and glow
I was a girl. I was juniper
or magnolia, all violet and rage
Marmots, foxfire, black
rememberings in the scrub, now
I remember our rusted buckets
as we gathered sour apples
in the winds, your long hair
matting to silver and gold
the shimmer of your teared eyes
gone cold.
Above the calm exterior of roses, spiders bloom
fat with the afternoon buzzings.
They are harmless.
They are keeping the flies
off my back porch.
They have beautiful women drawn on their bodies.
Their legs are ugly
but useful;
look what they leave in the dew. Look.
With our arms holding each other’s waists, we walked the waking streets
back to your empty flat,
ignoring the horns and catcalls behind us, ignoring what
the years had brought between us:
my diploma and the bare bulb
that always lit your bookless room
May 8, 2017
I really loved the imagery and voice Lorna shared, would love to read more of her work. It inspired me. Love the use of the word: "Mescalito".
June 26, 2018
2 1/4 stars
April 28, 2020
File this under powerful female voices
February 2, 2021
Surprising
September 12, 2021
Revisiting these wonderful poems. The book won the 1982 American Book Award. A Latina, in the 80s, yup, and she's still around writing poetry and kicking butt.
September 23, 2021
Ehh. It was ok.
Read
April 29, 2022Read this for class, enjoyed the many forms around the theme of change.
October 30, 2022
I went to a reading of this book and watched it come to life. Loved it.
March 8, 2024
Sigh. I think I’m warming towards poetry. This was good
February 5, 2025
oh this was life changing
August 10, 2010
I only needed to read the following poems: "Uncle's First Rabbit," "Cannery Town in August," "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," "For Virginia Chavez," "Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races"
I'm not really in to "modern" poetry, but the imagery in these poems is very vivid, which I do like - even if the imagery is violent and negative. I like to read things that make my emotions run high (good and bad) - makes me feel my blood pumping.
I'm not really in to "modern" poetry, but the imagery in these poems is very vivid, which I do like - even if the imagery is violent and negative. I like to read things that make my emotions run high (good and bad) - makes me feel my blood pumping.
August 7, 2007
I think it is unfortunate that the back cover description stamps the poems of this book as "remarkable for their surface clarity." While there is much gratification found in an initial surface read here, it is little compared to what one finds during a deep reading. Deceivingly subtle, these poems fit much more genuinely within that Emily Dickinson school of poetic intention, tell all the truth but tell it slant...
January 20, 2025
Gorgeous collection of poetry. Her words are so clear, vivid and resonated so much with me as a young woman. Cervantes is surprisingly underrated for how beautiful her work is. This is quite possibly my favorite poetry anthology.
August 19, 2023
"Racism is not intellectual.
I can not reason these scars away."
I read Emplumada first near the end of 2019 and around a year and a half later I finally have my own copy, and I did not know how much I needed this book again until now.
I can not reason these scars away."
I read Emplumada first near the end of 2019 and around a year and a half later I finally have my own copy, and I did not know how much I needed this book again until now.
April 27, 2015
poetry is not really my jam but this was fine
December 27, 2015
Dark, bloody, revealing poetry. I love it.
December 27, 2015
It's been quite a while since I've read this book. It brought back a lot of memories of college.
May 2, 2013
was very interesting book of poems. I like the vivid imagery!
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews