Naked Wanting (Camino del Sol) [Paperback]

Margo Tamez (Author)

Book Description

Series: Camino del Sol | Publication Date: March 1, 2003

Come, step outside your human skin for just a little while. Margo Tamez's voice is that of the cicada and the cricket, the raven and the crane. In this volume of poetry, she shows us that the earth is an erotic current linking all beings, a vibrant network of birth, death, and rebirth. A sacred intertwining from which we as humans have become disconnected. Tamez shares the perspective of other creatures in images that remind us of Nature's beauty and fragility. An invocation of birds: "Sudden hum / wings touching / wings in swift turn / hush / a fast red out of the flux." An appreciation for the delicacy of insects, for spiderwebs "like a hundred needle-thin tubes of blown glass." Here too are reflections on childbirth and children—and on miscarriage, when damage inflicted on the environment by herbicides comes back to haunt all of us in our skin and bones, our very wombs. Warning of "the chemical cocktail seeping into the air ducts," she brings the voice of someone who has experienced firsthand what happens when our land and water are compromised. For Margo Tamez, earth, food, and family are the essentials of life, and we ignore them at our own peril. "If a person / does not admit the peril . . . that becomes a dangerous / form of existence." Written with the wisdom of one who knows and loves the land, her lyrical meditations speak to the naked wanting in us all.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Naked Wanting is a book we hunger for and yearn to wrap around us like a blanket, safe in the knowledge that while the world deadens us, poetry keeps our spirits alive." —Tucson Weekly "Link[s] poetry and politics, as well as gifting the reader with rich, insightful meditations on the body." —Multicultural Review "Affirms our natural love of life . . . Heart-stopping moments and other little nightmares." —Southwest Book Views

From the Back Cover

Come, step outside your human skin for just a little while.

Margo Tamez's voice is that of the cicada and the cricket, the raven and the crane. In this volume of poetry, she shows us that the earth is an erotic current linking all beings, a vibrant network of birth, death, and rebirth. A sacred intertwining from which we as humans have become disconnected.

Tamez shares the perspective of other creatures in images that remind us of Nature's beauty and fragility. An invocation of birds: "Sudden hum / wings touching / wings in swift turn / hush / a fast red out of the flux." An appreciation for the delicacy of insects, for spiderwebs "like a hundred needle-thin tubes of blown glass."

Here too are reflections on childbirth and children--and on miscarriage, when damage inflicted on the environment by herbicides comes back to haunt all of us in our skin and bones, our very wombs. Warning of "the chemical cocktail seeping into the air ducts," she brings the voice of someone who has experienced firsthand what happens when our land and water are compromised.

For Margo Tamez, earth, food, and family are the essentials of life, and we ignore them at our own peril. "If a person / does not admit the peril . . . that becomes a dangerous / form of existence." Written with the wisdom of one who knows and loves the land, her lyrical meditations speak to the naked wanting in us all.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 91 pages
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press (March 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816522480
• ISBN-13: 978-0816522484
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,421,734 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Margo Tamez stuns the reader with Naked Wanting, June 16, 2007

By 

Lisa Alvarado (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Wanting (Camino del Sol) (Paperback)

If you're looking for spun sugar literary confection, and easy comfort, move on. But if you want to encounter
poetry that disturbs you in the best possible way, keeps you up at night, demands that you respond with your
heart and your mind, read both Naked Wanting and Raven Eye.

Margo Tamez is a poet whose work is not easy, clearly born of experience raw and real, making the reader touch that place of pain, of personal wounding far, far, away from the romance of the Southwest and the stereotype of the "stoic noble" on the rez. Her writing forces us to look where the bodies are buried, when we want to turn a blind eye to the violence wreaked upon the individual and environment. Both Naked Wanting and Raven Eye gave me that gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, the tight, clenched first buried in the chest. Bless her for that.

And bless her, too, for somehow still weaving threads of redemption and reemergence in the face of soulbreaking sorrow, for offering real mythos and confronting false spirituality.

In My Mother Returns to Calaboz, there is a visceral longing for home, for groundedness in the deepest and most literal sense. It reflects an abiding love for la tierra, but not the convenient, fantasy-laden Southwest. It is a personal, damaged homeland, smelling of chemicals, shot through with run-off that is still somehow, unquestionably sacred. Tamez writes of border dwellers unbowed, unabsorbed, defiant, and ultimately triumphant - not noble, but stubbornly flawed and human.

Lisa Alvarado, poet, editor, literary critic