Rachel Mckibbens

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been just five years long, but would imprint itself on her and her later relationships, queer and straight, for the rest of her life. In EXCAVATION: A MEMOIR, the black and white of the standard victim/perpetrator stereotype gives way to unsettling grays. The present- day narrator reflects on the girl she once was, as well as the teacher and parent she has become. It's a beautifully written and powerful story of a woman reclaiming her whole heart.

BuzzFeed's Books Coming in 2019 That You'll Want To Keep On Your Radar NPR's 2019 Poetry Preview NBC's 8 Excellent Latino Poetry Books for National Poetry Month The Rumpus's Books To Read in 2019 Remezcla's 8 Books to Read this Year Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of 2019 Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books To Read For Spring 2019 “Through a range of forms―tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more―the poems in Scenters-Zapico’s second collection . . . incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Unflinching, Scenters-Zapico highlights the hardships and stigma immigrants face on both sides of the border, her desire to create change shining through in every line. Lima :: Limón is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing.

Weaving together a quilt out of Ebonics, Deep Southern tradition and a courageous intimacy, Aurielle Marie's Gumbo Ya Ya defends Black girlhood with bare hands, suturing each brilliant wound with a dignity and urgency that guts this poetry debut. <br/>In a stunning collection that is as much a war song as it is a love letter, Aurielle Marie's contemporary American poems reveal the dexterity of language, time, and rigor at each masterful shift. Grounded in historical context and pop-cultural orientation, Marie's work manages to maintain a lyricism that bends even time to her will. <br/>Gumbo Ya Ya chews into the gristle of Black girlhood with beauty, confronting a gritty depiction of both America and her native South. The poet charms as much as she astonishes, and tends to the wounds of her audience as much as her own, all the while fiercely praising the legacy of courage and survival in young girls. Marie retrieves ancestors from their graves, honors the inheritance of resistance and dares to offer cultural criticism with vulnerability and risk. More than magic, Gumbo Ya Ya serves what everyone hungers for: a girl allowed the full spectrum of humanity, in this coming-of-age retelling like no other<br/>