Overview

From Lightning's Strike is a collection of lyric poems rooted in ancestral Ch'ol Mayan culture and animated by vivid images of the natural world. Written by Juana Karen Peñate, winner of the 2020 Indigenous Literatures of the Americas Award, and translated from the Mayan Ch'ol, these multivocal poems recall the work of Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, and Adrienne Rich. Honest, searching, and assertively female, Peñate speaks from and about the body, celebrating an intimate bond with nature while confronting the personal and the political. Carol Rose Little and Charlotte Friedman, linguist and poet, respectively, worked in partnership to bring this unique voice to English-speaking audiences.

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9781952781322

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Reviews

In the poetry of Juana Karen Peñate, beautifully translated from Ch'ol into English by Carol Rose Little and Charlotte Friedman, body and language become precise coordinates for affirming the strength of a brilliant voice that, in the light of its ancestors, rhythmically moves through memory and time, asserting rootedness, presence, and belonging to the earth that shelters it. - Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez, Assistant Professor of Spanish, UC Davis From Lightning's Strike by Juana Karen Peñate, translated from the Mayan Ch'ol into a supple English by Carol Rose Little and Charlotte Friedman, is a quiet joy to read. There is an elemental quality to the poetry, as in its focus on the elements: wind, rain, fire, water, earth, sky, and, of course, lightning, similar to Japanese haiku, with its attention to the natural world as an expression of human nature. In poems written from a woman's perspective, with hints of violence and loss around the edges-the death of family members, a lover's cruelty, the difficulty of living among the non-Indigenous -the natural world remains succor and source of power, as does the Ch'ol language itself. What a gift the poet and translators have given us, reminding us of our vital connection to nature! - Sharon Dolin, author of Imperfect Present and translator of Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga This urgent volume of Juana Karen Peñate's poems, emerging from an ancient yet long suppressed tradition of Mayan literature, sings not only of hurt and loss but also of renaissance and reconnection. It strikes on fundamental themes that would have been recognized from the earliest times as well as those, like migration and language loss, that define the modern experience. It represents an all too rare chance to read Indigenous Mexican poetry in its original form together with its translation, co-produced by a linguist who has studied the intricacies of Ch'ol grammar and a poet who has devoted herself to narrative expression. - Daniel Kaufman, Co-Director and Co-Founder, Endangered Language Alliance

Author Information

Juana Karen Peñate is a poet, writer, translator, educator and cultural promoter from Emiliano Zapata, Tumbalá, Chiapas, Mexico. She has authored several books of poetry in Ch'ol with self-translations in Spanish including ""Mi nombre ya no es silencio"" (Coneculta 2002) and ""Ipusik'al Matye'lum/Heart of a Wild Land"", published by Pluralia in 2013. In 2020, Peñate won the Premio de Literaturas Indígenas de América for her collection ""Isoñil Ja'al/ Danza de la Lluvia"", published by the University of Guadalajara. ""Ñumeñ mi kajel tyi kolel bajche' k'uxel/Voy a crecer más que el dolor"" was published in 2024 by Oralibrura. Carol Rose Little is an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Oklahoma whose work centers on the Ch'ol language. She learned Ch'ol through her ongoing fieldwork beginning in 2015 in Ch'ol-speaking communities in Chiapas where she has spent extended periods over the past decade. She has also served as an interpreter for Ch'ol speakers in federal and state courts in the United States. Charlotte Friedman is a poet, author and teacher. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and published in Naugatuck River Review, Stoneboat, Quartet, Timberline and elsewhere. She is the author of Channeling Grace and The Girl Pages: A Handbook of the Best Resources for Strong, Confident, Creative Girls (Hyperion). Friedman taught narrative medicine in the English department at Barnard College, Columbia University for ten years and in hospitals in New York and Jerusalem

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