Overview

This English/Spanish bilingual edition of Blood Sugar Canto appears on the tenth anniversary of the first edition of ire'ne lara silva's essential collection. Poet Julieta Corpus worked closely with silva to convey as much of the music and power of the original as possible. The English verse and its Spanish translation appear on facing pages. Blood Sugar Canto is a powerful hymn to life and to the poet's own body by a ""curandera-poet"" struggling to transmute the fear and despair of diabetes into healing. She sings of the syringes, the paraphernalia of this new world she must live in, its losses and griefs, its pain, and her memories of those in her family who have died of this disease.

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Reviews

""Silva is a poet-curandera who 'sings the body electric, ' transforming suffering into song. She probes the ways that love, justice and forgiveness help heal our individual selves and our communities. I am profoundly grateful for ire'ne's hard-won wisdom and poetic gifts."" -Demetria Martínez, author of The Block Captain's Daughter ""Once again, Silva brings us a kind of soul-exploration unprecedented in American letters. A poet of gut-wrenching honesty and visceral language, here, Silva aims her pen at a subject that concerns us all-health. In this case it is the subject of food, what we consume and what consumes us, and how these consumptions manifest in our bodies and minds, and in the way we love, one another and ourselves. blood sugar canto is an ode to the needle-prick of the diabetic, a letter to the inheritances of hunger and habit, a 'love-song' to our collective internal organs. The poet invites us to an intimate dinner at her table, to sit and eat with her, share stories of azucar, of labwork and grace, to indulge ourselves in the unspoken cravings, and we leave nourished, full, and stronger for it."" -Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Natural Takeover of Small Things ""ire'ne lara silva's poetry is the poetry of examination. In blood sugar canto, her verses fight to live and they are hard pressed to surrender. Silva understands that blood and sugar, tortilla y tequila, even at their most deadly, deserve song. When we get tired of speaking, tired of fighting, Silva's poetry will not let us check out for fear; it will stand, song in hand, ready for battle."" -Willie Perdomo, author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon ""I am stunned by ire'ne lara silva's blood sugar canto, a searing and intensely personal and political collection of poems...The exhausted self, pricked by syringes, prodded by clinicians, fights fiercely to love and to decolonize the self, the changing body. These are poems of confronting traumas and of mourning. Ultimately, Silva's poems are filled with important, hopeful and triumphant words; 'you cannot live in fear / you cannot heal in fear / fear will never make you stronger ... i will not / live / in fear / i will make song.'"" -Barbara Jane Reyes, author of Poeta en San Francisco and Diwata

Author Information

ire'ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, and the eaters of flowers, which won Gold for the 2025 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book (ILBA), a comic book, VENDAVAL, and two short story collections, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán, and the light of your body. ire'ne is the recipient of the 2026 Jessie H. Jones Fellowship, the ILBA 2025 Rising Stars Poetry Award, a 2025 Storyknife Writers Residency, the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake wardfor Best Short Nonfiction, a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO's 2013 Gift of Freedom Award.

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