Overview

In the poetry collection, Border Duende, Gina Valdés gifts the reader with intimate portrayals of lives lived in the United States-Mexico border region. With her duende as guide, the poet invites the reader to witness the tensions, perils, joys, and magic of life on the borderlands. She explores the themes of migration, identity, and cultural shifts through a Mexican-American lens with a wide-angle perspective that values merging and variation and that celebrates a bilingual, bicultural existence in poems written ""under the spell of two tongues"". She beams a light on the book's characters unwavering resitance to the discrimination they sometimes face and on their choice of self-empowerment. In the central poem, ""Border Duende,"" the duende speaks and chronicles a journey of familial class and gender tensions. The poetic voice, clear and accesible, is heightened by bilingualism, wit and humor, and evocative and inventive language in poems that are mostly short and lyrical and at times musical and incantatory, proving that duende-inspiration and soul-is present in this award-winning poetry collection.

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9781963245738

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Reviews

""In this evocative collection of poems, Border Duende, Gina Valdés explores the complex intersections of cultural identity, gender, and politics through the lens of the Mexican-American experience. ""The border is a wall of barbed lies,"" she says, giving us a hint on how to read her book. Drawing on childhood memories, family history, and current events, Valdés weaves together a tapestry that is both raw and nuanced. With a powerful voice that resonates long after the final page, Valdés cements her place as a vital voice in contemporary Chicano literature."" - Agustín Cadena, author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, fiction, and essays. ""There is a deceptive simplicity in Gina Valdés' poems that opens the reader's heart to their gift of singular wide-angled perspective. Border Duende flows with a tenacious capacity for humor and for tender and deep-rooted compassion-that earthen pot of poetry. The cultural textures these poems offer are rooted in a simple clarity of the validity of variation and the subtle balancing of tensions. The poetic voice as keen observer juxtaposes and shifts kaleidoscopically, speaks for an array of joys, slits, and wounds, for the seeds of light and love, for a geography of cultural crossroads that document the subtle threads of merging. Border Duende brings the reader to the very borders of the poetic, of human life: 'On my walk on earth / may I walk on earth's edge / sky's rim / where worlds meet.'"" - Claire Joysmith, writer, translator, author of three volumes of poetry, and editor of the anthology Cantar de espejos: Poesía testimonial chicana de mujeres. ""With her duende as guide in her book Border Duende, Gina Valdés takes us on a journey through a land of ""contacts and fractures,"" of deserts, walls, and rivers, where Chaplin and Cantinflas romp and ""El Santo wrestles Batman."" Engaging language as inventive as the border itself, each poem is a portrayal of life along this international line. She writes, 'words followed me home, ' the result of that original enchantment is a delicious volume of poetry written 'under the spell of two tongues.'"" - Olivia Teresa Ruiz Marrujo, poet and comparative scholar of Mexico's northern and southern borders

Author Information

Gina Valdés was born in Los Angeles in the segregated California Hospital during WWII. At the age of one, she experienced her first migration, north to south, and at nine, her second migration, south to north, growing up bilingual and bicultural on both sides of the United States-Mexico border. Her older sister Martha introduced her to poetry at the age of six, their grandmother's books of Mexican poets, among them, Sor Juana, Juan de Dios Peza, and Amado Nervo. The poetry spellbound her and the enchantment never left. Since then until now she has been reading and writing poetry. She was the recipient of a full Regents' Scholarship and received a B.A. degree in Creative Writing and an M.A. degree in Spanish Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Besides teaching beginning ESL and every level of Spanish, she taught Literature and Writing for twenty-five years, at UCSD, UCDavis, UCLA, SDSU. The University of Washington, and Colorado College.This year, 2025, Valdés marks fifty years publishing fiction and poetry. She published her first poems in the NewAge Journal in 1975, and has continued to publish her work in journals, anthologies, and textbooks in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, in five languages, in ten countries. She has published two bilingual poetry chapbooks, Comiendo lumbre/Eating Fire and Puentes y fronteras/Bridges and Borders, a novel, There Are No Madmen Here, and an award-winning poetry collection, Border Duende, was published this year, 2025, by FlowerSong Press. She resides in San Diego near family in the midst of diverse and abundant fauna and flora.

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