Water permeates this stunning collection—ocean, lake, saliva, tears, sweat, blood—and the deeper Felicia Zamora excavates the purer it becomes. Revisiting her childhood as a Latina living in poverty in the United States, Zamora explores racial trauma, estrangement from inherited culture and language, and the instinct to retreat into the body as a space of understanding. Grounded in the specificity of her history, her body, and her life, these poems find the universal threads that connect hummingbirds to whales, Galapagos tortoises to Matt Groening cartoons, family photographs to joy and heartache. Zamora scavenges her past and America’s present for the hidden meanings at the borders of the social and environmental, linguistic and physical, familial and personal. Along the way she enters into conversations with other poets, activists, and scholars, seeking wisdom, tracing wounds, and amplifying the voices of the marginalized, ultimately creating a space to constellate radical imagination.
