Emmy Pérez’s poetry collection With the River on Our Face flows through the Southwest and the Texas borderlands to the river’s mouth in the Rio Grande Valley/El Valle. The poems celebrate the land, communities, and ecology of the borderlands through lyric and narrative utterances, auditory and visual texture, chant, and litany that merge and diverge like the iconic river in this long-awaited collection. Pérez reveals the strengths and nuances of a universe where no word is “foreign.” Her fast-moving, evocative words illuminate the prayers, gasps, touches, and gritos born of everyday discoveries and events. Multiple forms of reference enrich the poems in the form of mantra: ecologist’s field notes, geopolitical and ecofeminist observations, wildlife catalogs, trivia, and vigil chants. “What is it to love / within viewing distance of night / vision goggles and guns?” is a question central to many of these poems. The collection creates a poetic confluence of the personal, political, and global forces affecting border lives. Whether alluding to El Valle as a place where toxins now cross borders more easily than people or wildlife, or to increased militarization, immigrant seizures, and twenty-first-century wall-building, Pérez’s voice is intimate and urgent. She laments, “We cannot tattoo roses / On the wall / Can’t tattoo Gloria Anzaldúa’s roses / On the wall”; yet, she also reaffirms Anzaldúa’s notions of hope through resilience and conocimiento. With the River on Our Face drips deep like water, turning into amistad—an inquisition into human relationships with planet and self.

With the River on Our Face (Camino del Sol)

Literature & Fiction

Pérez, Emmy

Poetry

University of Arizona Press

The poetry of Emmy Perez celebrates and grieves borders, the division between poverty and sustenance. Perez's precise and soulful language erases boundaries...Two languages are barely enough to name her world--Mary Jane Nealon. "In SOLSTICE Emmy Perez looks deeply at shards of the physical world, its sensual body, its cycles...Perez follows the personal and cultural connections and beckons us to take part in her discoveries"--Molly Bendall. Emmy Perez received an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and Crab Orchard Review.

Solstice

History & Criticism

Swan Scythe Press

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. Emmy Pérez sings the borderlands between America and Mexico, a contested land where identity and nationality are under constant surveillance. Her poetry forces the reader to feel the persons who live in those lands. In poems that follow the currents of the Rio Grande, she re-immerses readers in the waters where we all developed, fills our senses with the scent of blooming roses, of burning mesquite, and crashes us into the barriers erected to prevent the development of cross-border relationships. Reading Pérez ignites the desire to experience the heat and the sere landscape, and generates anger at the destruction of all that flourishes there. 
"Emmy Pérez's poems are elegantly political, never polemical. They discover the beauty in revolution without romanticizing its hardships. From the first moment I encountered her poems, I knew I was meeting a singular voice--one that can find lyricism in struggle, dignity in injustice. Her voice sings of landscape and longing with deftness of image and diction. What a welcome debut."--Allison Joseph 
"The new generation of Latina poets will be noted for the work of writers such as Emmy Pérez. Her poems are houses of light, reminding us that family and culture survive the political realities and darkness of our time."--Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review 
"The poetry of Emmy Pérez celebrates and grieves borders, the division between countries, between generations, between poverty and sustenance. Pérez's precise and soulful language erases boundaries. Everything is given reverence, and she asks, alway, how she can honor what is lost... Two languages are barely enough to name her world."--Mary Jane Nealon 
"The people and ghosts who populate SOLSTICE define place by bridging and haunting the geography... Pérez creates geography through an exquisite attention to the natural surroundings... Within the descriptions of the desert, Pérez evokes lyric intensity through her surprising use of line-break... Not only does Pérez have an impeccable eye for the imagistic moment, but she also weaves these images into complex prosodic tension."--Craig Santos Perez, Rattle

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Books by Pérez, Emmy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pérez, Emmy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

With the River on Our Face (Camino del Sol)

Solstice

Solstice