Overview

""A flame burns at the core of Briana Muñoz's Matriarchy that both illuminates and razes social monstrosities. Fire is reignited as ceremonial copal, fire-keepers, wildfire, firewood, fire dance, Israeli fire, and more, in the context of eternal nature, our common lived experience, and the dying structures of the Patriarchy. You will find words in these poems that consume, transform, and regenerate in crisis and creation. It is an offering for our time and the future.""-Michael Warr, 2020 Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Awardee and poetry editor of the anthology Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton)""These poems seek and build refuge-where our ancestors once danced and prayed, in grandmothers' kitchens, at la pulga, in the womb, or an adobe house. Briana Muñoz reminds us that, even in colonized lands, in times of war, despite the forces of violence and oppression, we belong to mother earth, to our own mothers, to the land and rivers, and to one another. Like danza, like ceremony, Matriarchy is an offering, willing us into healing and rebirth paso por paso, one line, one verse, one poem at a time.""-Michelle Otero, City of Albuquerque Poet Laureate 2018-2020 and author of Vessels: A Memoir of Borders

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Reviews

""Matriarchy: Sacred Poems is written in the language of ceremony and life-giving forces that exist within and around us. Briana Muñoz's poetry exquisitely describes a perspective that is sometimes beyond the parameters of our colonized languages, and she does so with conviction and clarity. Muñoz's ability to honor her indigenous lineage through the ancestral womb invites us to become intimately aware of each poem in this beautiful collection of poetry. We are born to the whole truth of who we are in this matriarchal floricanto. ¡Que viva la mujer que da vida a la palabra!""-Aideed Medina, City of Fresno Poet Laureate 2025-2027 and author of Segmented Bodies""Read Briana Muñoz's poem ""This Is Not a Religious Poem but It Is One of Devotion"" to your lover and try to tell me that you don't feel called to give birth to a revolution in a bathtub, love selflessly and endlessly among the songs of the coyōtl, welcome the sensual into your politics. Her poems slither and erase that line between daughter, mother, lover, revolutionary-all those prismatic ways of being collapse and expand in her voice.""-Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, author of La Movida and The Easy Body

Author Information

Briana Muñoz is a poet from Southern California. She is the author of Loose Lips (Prickly Pear Publishing, 2019) and Everything is Returned to the Soil (FlowerSong Press, 2021). Her work has been published in the anthologies: Somos Xicanas, Reimagine America, and Beat Not Beat, as well as on websites and literary journals: Cultural Daily, The Oakland Arts Review, Dryland Literary Journal, Angel City Review, and several other publications.Briana is the founder of Poetry as Harm Reduction and currently serves as a member on the board of directors for the Los Angeles Poetry Society. She has performed poetry in places like the International Poetry Festival of Havana, Cuba, the 2015 Festival de Poesia in Tijuana, Baja California, MX, as well as at the XXI Congreso Internacional de Literatura y Estudios Hispanicos in Quito, Ecuador.She currently lives in Southern California with her partner and child. Juan Daniel Gomez ""Ojo de Cipactli"" is a photographer in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas. He has five years of experience capturing emotion filled moments through his lens. He took up a camera shortly before the murder of George Floyd and used it to document the following BLM, BIPOC, And LGTBQ+ protests that took over LA and OC. As the protests grew smaller, he transitioned into documenting non-profits focusing on low-income families and the unhoused. He expanded his focus to include indigenous cultural ceremonies, regalias, and the bonds formed by those that share in the practices as a community. Cherille Williams (Navajo/Dinè) is an artist from Fort Wingate, New Mexico, who works with photography. Cherille's art focuses on narratives surrounding family, interpersonal relations, self-identity, childhood trauma, self-worth, and her family's cultural history in New Mexico. In addition, her work strives to show the unseen beauty of the place and highlights cultural landmarks that connect her Native roots to New Mexico. Cherille's interest in photographing her mother also helped her discover a passion for celebrating the power and beauty of aging with time, while highlighting the issues that some elders face, such as dealing with trauma, and helping to share their stories through photography.

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