MyOTHER TONGUE – Rosa Alcala

"How do we trace shifts of home or syllable, the history of becoming in language? We show what's passed on with the mother-milk, the blood-words, pushed from the body onto the page. That's what these poems do, spilling beautifully, forming in the mouth of the reader. This is the 'ark built to survive': our things built with words circling, mother-to-daughter-to- mother-to-daughter." — Eleni Sikelianos

"Here are poems that reckon with the histories of family, generations, language and love: how our tongues are mothered or not, how we are given to and abandoned. Alcalá writes, 'What good is it to erect/ of absence/ a word?' Tough and gorgeous, smart and touching, these poems are offerings that tie, untie, unite, entice." — Hoa Nguyen

"Rosa Alcalá's new poemario MYOTHER TONGUE begins in the archives of what has yet to be written. She writes with precision and dynamism from the borders between death (of a mother) and birth (of a daughter). What a body produces, and what produces a body: labor, trauma, memory, sacrifice, pain, danger, and language formed both on the tongue and in the culture and the spaces between what can be said and what is missing, the linguistic and existential problem of not having the right words. The darknesses in Alcalá's work emerge from what happens when we don't see ourselves in the languages that both form and destroy us as we labor in this 'dream called money.' Alcalá is a {un}documentarian of the highest order, a {un}documentarian of what history and memory try to erase. Her poems are urgent, demanding and haunting." — Daniel Borzutzky

Rosa Alcalá is the author of Undocumentaries and The Lust of Unsentimental Waters. The recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, she has translated the work of Cecilia Vicuña, Lila Zemborain, and Lourdes Vázquez, among other poets. Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, edited and translated by Alcalá, was runner-up for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Born and raised in Paterson, NJ, she now lives in El Paso, TX, where she teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas-El Paso.