A TONGUE in the MOUTH of the DYING

By Laurie Ann Guerrero
Winner of the 2012 Andrés Montoya
Poetry Prize

Selected by Francisco X. Alarcón

 
Filled with the nuanced beauty and complexity of the everyday—a pot of beans, a goat carcass, embroidered linens, a grandfather’s cancer—A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying journeys through the inherited fear of creation and destruction. Guerrero’s tongue becomes a palpable border, occupying those liminal spaces that both unite and divide, inviting readers to straddle and explore that what is known and unknown: the body. Guerrero explores not just the right, but the ability to speak and fight for oneself, one’s children, one’s community—in poems that testify how, too often, we fail to see the power reflected in the mirror.

 
Available February 2013

University of Notre Dame Press

undpress.nd.edu ·
(800) 621-2736

ISBN 978-0-268-01047-8

Laurie Ann Guerrero received the Academy of American Poets Prize, among others, at Smith College. Winner of the 2012 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, her first full-length collection, A TONGUE IN THE MOUTH OF THE DYING, selected by Francisco X. Alarcon, is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Guerrero's poetry and critical work have appeared or are forthcoming in Huizache, Texas Monthly, Acentos Review, Women's Studies Quarterly, Palo Alto Review, Global City Review, Texas Observer, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Feminist Studies and others. Born and raised in the Southside of San Antonio, Guerrero holds a B.A. in English Language & Literature from Smith College and an MFA from Drew University. Guerrero's chapbook, Babies Under the Skin (2008), won the Panhandler Publishing Award, chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye. A CantoMundo fellow and member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop, she has recently joined the editorial staff at Austin-based Dos Gatos Press, publishers of The Texas Poetry Calendar. Guerrero is on the faculty at the University of the Incarnate Word and is a Visiting Writer in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Texas, El Paso.