Beast meridian / Vanessa Angélica Villarreal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica, author.

Contributor:

Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

Series:

Akrilica series

Akrilica Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mexican American women.

Mexican American women--Poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

95 pages : color illustrations ; 26 cm.

Other Title:

Beast meridian, poems.

Place of Publication:

[Blacksburg, Virginia] : Noemi Press, [2017]

Summary:

Narrates the first- generation Mexican American girl, tracking the experiences of cultural displacement, the inheritance of generational trauma, sexist and racist violence, sexual assault, economic struggle, and institutional racism and sexism that disproportionately punishes brown girls in crisis. Narrated by a speaker in mourning marked as an at- risk juvenile, psychologically troubled, an offender, expelled and sent to alternative school for adolescents with behavioral issues, and eventually, a psychiatric hospital, it survives the school to prison pipeline, the immigrant working class condition, grueling low- pay service jobs, conservative classism against Latinxs in Texas, queerness, assimilation, and life wrapped up in frivolous citations, fines, and penalties. The traumatic catalyst for the long line of trouble begins with the death of a beloved young grandmother from preventable cervical cancer--another violence of systemic racism and sexism that prevents regular reproductive and sexual health care to poor immigrant communities--and the subsequent deaths of other immigrant family members who are mourned in the dissociative states amidst the depressive trauma that opens the book. The dissociative states that mark the middle--a surreal kind of shadowland where the narrator encounters her animal self and ancestors imagined as animals faces brutal surreal challenges on the way back to life beyond trauma--is a kind of mictlan, reimagined as a state of constant mourning that challenges American notions of "healing" from trauma, and rather acknowledges sadness, mourning, and memory as a necessary state of constant awareness to forge a "way back" toward a broader healing of earth, time, body, history -- Provided by the publisher.

Notes:

"Letras Latinas"--Back cover.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Laura Jan Meyerson Poetry Fund.

ISBN:

9781934819654

1934819654

OCLC:

1004262255

Publisher Number:

99977987396