Customer Reviews

Raven Eye (Sun Tracks)

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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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