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Poems
by Sandra Cisneros
A brave new collection of poems from Sandra Cisneros, the best-selling author of The House on Mango Street.
It has been twenty-eight years since Sandra Cisneros published a book of poetry. With dozens of never-before-seen poems, Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home—in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.
"Nearly three decades have passed since the award-winning Cisneros's previous collection (Loose Woman), and what a joy to immerse oneself in the richness of those years! ... These poems sparkle with levity, empathy, sensuality, and sight. An appreciation for the aging self, its evolving body and understanding, threads the work, as do wit and humor...Rather than avoid pain or suffering, the poems explore their coexistence with wonder and beauty...Woven with perspective, melded by dual languages and countries, attuned to sense and place, this generously alive collection--sin censura ni vergüenza--will delight both devoted fans and those who may not often read poetry." - Library Journal (starred review)
"These plainspoken, affecting poems reveal a writer fortified by a sometimes difficult past who has come to embrace the freedom that comes with self-acceptance...The frequent use of Spanish words and fresh images of quotidian moments of life in Mexico...act as both description and invitation." - Publishers Weekly
"Cisneros writes with irresistible intimacy, especially in her poetry. We feel confided in, teased, moved, and jolted as she explores matters earthy and spiritual. Cisneros is funny and lacerating, caring and mischievous. In this gathering of three decades of poems pithy and lush, brash and sexy, compassionate and outraged, she considers the places she's lived, family, lovers, neighbors, moments of wonder, injustices epic and personal, and the ways age can so rudely resculpt the body even while liberating the mind...This is a delectably saucy and incisive, righteous and resonant collection." - Booklist
This information about Woman Without Shame was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, national and international book awards, including the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. More recently, she received the Ford Foundation's Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: Macondo Writers and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. As a single woman she made the choice to have books instead of children. A citizen of both the United States and Mexico, Cisneros currently lives in San Miguel de Allende and makes her living by her pen.
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