Raven Eye

Raven Eye
By Margo Tamez
96 pp. / 6.00 in x 8.00 in / 2007
Paper (978-0-8165-2565-2)

Series
- Sun Tracks

Related Interest
- Poetry
- Native American Studies

Written from thirteen years of journals, psychic and earthly, this poetry maps an uprising of a borderland indigenous woman battling forces of racism and sexual violence against Native women and

Some poetry falls readily into categories and schools, but there isn't yet a poetics to confine Tamez. . . . She is bold and forthright as she maps this world. Her topics range from brutality against women to tender lust, from industrial pollution to hopes for children, but her subject is consistent: the effect of marginalization on people, places, and the planet.

—Booklist

Margo Tamez's new collection of poems is anarchic, throbs with weather,
colors and quotations of a brave life that is not yours—there is
phantom-like music in these poems that reminds me of the eerie sedations
of a long night of 78rpms. This is brilliant work that strikes out at
many of the complacent pieties of our age and art.

—Norman Dubie

children. This lyric collection breaks new ground, skillfully revealing an unseen narrative of resistance on the Mexico-U.S. border. A powerful blend of the oral and long poem, and speaking into the realm of global movements, these poems explore environmental injustice, sexualized violence, and indigenous women's lives. These complex and necessary themes are at the heart of award-winning poet Margo Tamez's second book of poetry. Her poems bring forth experiences of a raced and gendered life along the border. Tamez engages the experiences of an indigenous life, refusing labels of Mexican or Native American as social constructs of a colonized people. This book is a challenging cartography of colonialism, poverty, and issues of Native identity and demonstrates these as threats to the environment, both ecological and social, in the borderlands. Each poem is crafted as if it were a minute prayer, dense with compassion and unerring optimism. But the hope that Tamez serves is not blind. In poem after poem, she draws us into a space ruled by mythic symbolism and the ebb and flow of the landscape—a place where comfort is compromised and where we must work to relearn the nature of existence and the value of life.

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