Come, step outside your human skin for just a little while. Margo Tamez's voice is that of the cicada and the cricket, the raven and the crane. In this volume of poetry, she shows us that the
Naked Wanting is a book we hunger for and yearn to wrap around us like a blanket, safe in the knowledge that while the world deadens us, poetry keeps our spirits alive.
—Tucson Weekly
Link[s] poetry and politics, as well as gifting the reader with rich, insightful meditations on the body.
—Multicultural Review
Affirms our natural love of life . . . Heart-stopping moments and other little nightmares.
—Southwest Book Views
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earth is an erotic current linking all beings, a vibrant network of birth, death, and rebirth. A sacred intertwining from which we as humans have become disconnected. Tamez shares the perspective
of other creatures in images that remind us of Nature's beauty and fragility. An invocation of birds: "Sudden hum / wings touching / wings in swift turn / hush / a fast red out of the
flux." An appreciation for the delicacy of insects, for spiderwebs "like a hundred needle-thin tubes of blown glass." Here too are reflections on childbirth and children—and
on miscarriage, when damage inflicted on the environment by herbicides comes back to haunt all of us in our skin and bones, our very wombs. Warning of "the chemical cocktail seeping into the air
ducts," she brings the voice of someone who has experienced firsthand what happens when our land and water are compromised. For Margo Tamez, earth, food, and family are the essentials of
life, and we ignore them at our own peril. "If a person / does not admit the peril . . . that becomes a dangerous / form of existence." Written with the wisdom of one who knows and loves the
land, her lyrical meditations speak to the naked wanting in us all.
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