Raven Eye (Sun Tracks) [Paperback]

Margo Tamez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2007 | Series: Sun Tracks (Book 60)

Written from thirteen years of journals, psychic and earthly, this poetry maps an uprising of a borderland indigenous woman battling forces of racism and sexual violence against Native women and children. This lyric collection breaks new ground, skillfully revealing an unseen narrative of resistance on the Mexico–U.S. border. A powerful blend of the oral and long poem, and speaking into the realm of global movements, these poems explore environmental injustice, sexualized violence, and indigenous women’s lives. These complex and necessary themes are at the heart of award-winning poet Margo Tamez’s second book of poetry. Her poems bring forth experiences of a raced and gendered life along the border. Tamez engages the experiences of an indigenous life, refusing labels of Mexican or Native American as social constructs of a colonized people. This book is a challenging cartography of colonialism, poverty, and issues of Native identity and demonstrates these as threats to the environment, both ecological and social, in the borderlands. Each poem is crafted as if it were a minute prayer, dense with compassion and unerring optimism. But the hope that Tamez serves is not blind. In poem after poem, she draws us into a space ruled by mythic symbolism and the ebb and flow of the landscape—a place where comfort is compromised and where we must work to relearn the nature of existence and the value of life.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Some poetry falls readily into categories and schools, but there isn't yet a poetics to confine Tamez, for she writes of and from a hybrid identity--Indian and Spanish or, as she more clearly defines it, Lipan and Jumano Apache and Spanish Land Grant from South Texas--and a sense of global citizenship. Her rhetorically strong work moves between "warm cabernet" and "clinking beer bottles" as she negotiates a terrain more complex than the abstract term multicultural implies. She is bold and forthright as she maps this new world, describing herself as "an invisibility / Scudding through all the checkpoints / Border towns train tracks pesticide flybys welfare lines / Wings shifting shape." Her topics range from brutality against women to tender lust, from industrial pollution to hopes for children, but her subject is consistent: the effect of marginalization on people, places, and the planet. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Some poetry falls readily into categories and schools, but there isn't yet a poetics to confine Tamez. . . . She is bold and forthright as she maps this world. Her topics range from brutality against women to tender lust, from industrial pollution to hopes for children, but her subject is consistent: the effect of marginalization on people, places, and the planet." —Booklist "Margo Tamez’s new collection of poems is anarchic, throbs with weather, colors and quotations of a brave life that is not yours—there is phantom-like music in these poems that reminds me of the eerie sedations of a long night of 78rpms. This is brilliant work that strikes out at many of the complacent pieties of our age and art." —Norman Dubie

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press (March 29, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081652565X
• ISBN-13: 978-0816525652
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 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: #1,126,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Margo Tamez disrupts the stereotypes and crafts poetry of haunting truth, June 16, 2007

By 

Lisa Alvarado (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Raven Eye (Sun Tracks) (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 Ceremony of Peyote, there is no easy, pro forma way to reconnect, no perfect prayer that can be prayed. Colonialism and racism have taken their tolls both in daily life and spiritual practice. But this poem reclaims and reframes ritual with afrank, and unvarnished fervor. Tamez refuses to shirk from the distorted in herself, or in her people. But in the boldest move, Tamez' poetry reveals that Spirit still lives, lives deeply for her in the body, in the process of birth and renewal and in the threads of communion that emerge despite everything.

Lisa Alvarado, poet, editor, literary critic
La Bloga [...]
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