How Long She'll Last in This World

by Maria Melendez and Maria Melendez Kelson

Let go your keys, let go your gun, let go your good pen and your rings, let your wolf mask go and kiss goodbye your goddess figurine. With this invocation, María Meléndez beckons us on a journey--an exotic expedition through life's mysteries in search of the finer strands of experience. In a Latina voice laced with a naturalist's sense of wonder, she weaves bold images reflecting a world threaded by unseen wounds, now laid before us with an unflinching love of life and an exquisite precision of language. Adopting multiple guises--field researcher, laboring mother, grief-stricken lover--Meléndez casts aside stereotypes and expectations to forge a new language steeped in life and landscape. Whether meditating on a controlled prairie burn or contemplating the turquoise cheek of a fathead minnow, she weaves words and memories into a rich tapestry that resonates with sensual detail and magnifies her sense of maternal wildness, urging us to "Love as much as you / can, don't throw your heart / away to just one god." In her paean to the Aztec deity Tonacacihuatl, mother of the gods, Meléndez muses that "How many spirits she's twin to, and how long she'll last in this world, / are secrets stashed in the rattle / of corn ears, in the coils / of venomous snakes." Through stunning images and stark realism, her poems embrace motherhood and vocation, love and grief, land and life, to bring new meaning to the natural world and how we experience it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816525153
• ISBN13: 9780816525157
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

An articulate and engaging collection of remarkable poetry by Maria Melendez

How Long She'll Last In This World is an articulate and engaging collection of remarkable poetry by Maria Melendez. Drawing from her expansive knowledge of the environment and biology, Melendez creates poetry which induces muse and highlights the spirit as it carries its readers through a creative and evocative philosophy. American Adhaan (October 2001): Watch night spilling on the western edge/of invisible, its cool surrender/to the peach-colored clouds (just water/that has lately collapsed/into form).//How violently natural/my petroliferous valley looks/in this faint, blue wash;/the slow, arc'd strokes/of a great egret's wings/deny the crude thickness/of this air.//The shattered world's particulates/fall everywhere around us;/the call to prayer means bowing/and facing them all.