From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger

by Lorna Dee Cervantes

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Latino Literature Prize. Cervantes stretches the resources of language, imagery, and the dialectics of love, hunger, and aesthetics. "Cervantes is a poet with a clear, strong voice.... Her work is refreshing and deceptively simple, reflecting love of language and music. She manages all this without sacrificing the humor, power, and complexity of themes she explores as a female, Latina-American, lover, intellectual, and writer"--Jessica Hagedorn.

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1991

About the author

A 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.]

Reviews

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

An evocative and cohesive collection of poetry that effectively appropriates structures of time honored male poets such as Neruda and Garcia Lorca while maintaining a distinctively feminine tone.

[Mariposa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic and must-read for all. My mother introduced me to Cervantes's work, and this is my favorite collection by her.

[Erinallisonhurt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is Cervantes's second, and presents a series of poems with imagery so thick that one has a hard time discerning the larger ideas at work here. Working through some these lines takes an enormous amount of work, and is much less accessible in comparison to Cervantes's first collection (Emplumada). As evidence of the rigorous grappling these poems require, newer criticism about Cervantes fails to delve very deeply into this work. Critics often mention it as a publication: it came out in May 1991. Or, they ask about the circumstances surrounding the writing of these poems: Most of these poems were written following the brutal rape/murder of Cervantes's mother and Cervantes's ensuing five year sabbatical, in which she was convinced that she would never write again. After receiving her B.A. and taking courses in woodworking (she was determined to become a carpenter), Cervantes finally found herself writing again. She explains this book as coming out of, and dealing with, the emotions of that period.

I read this book before I knew any of the above, and it seems like her most difficult work to read (she has one newer collection, Drive). I felt lost much of the time, though I could certainly appreciate the tangled language that one finds on almost every page. I just didn't feel compelled to unravel the meanings, and so was left with a crush of images that didn't really stand out.