Overview

Poetry in Dangerous Times: Two Women, Two Worlds brings together two of America's most fearless literary voices. Demetria Martínez's and Susan Sherman's timely and intimate conversation spans decades, movements, and genres. Part memoir, part retrospective, and wholly poetic, this collection opens with a dialogue between the two authors. It then unfolds into a generous offering of new and selected poems from each. Martínez and Sherman explore the intersections of poetry and protest, weaving personal testimony with political reality from the 1960s through the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s to today. This is not just a poetry collection-it is a call to conscience.

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9781956375336

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Reviews

""Here are two poets who have faced dangerous times before, always with courage, patience, compassion, and eloquence. In the face of danger, they not only speak, but sing. The proof is in the pages of this unique and necessary collection, two women from two different worlds showing us our common ground, the path we must walk, illuminated by the fire in these poems, to find our common humanity, to find the way home."" -Martín Espada, author of the National Book Award-winning Floaters and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Republic of Poetry ""Socially engaged at all times, their work maintains a sharp yet subtle adherence to subjects that matter. The poems share an attractive economy of language, and both poets possess a delicate elusiveness that allows their socially concerned work to engagingly address realities in these dehumanizing times."" -Daisy Zamora, author of The Violent Foam: New & Selected Poems ""Perhaps this is just what we need now, now in these 'Dangerous Times': to hold onto a certain sanity found in truth-telling, if for no other reason than to inspire more truth-of histories forgotten, old-school knowledges reawakened, of movements that matter(ed), of loving that deepens wordlessly with aging."" -Cherríe Moraga, author of Native Country of the Heart ""When strong/queer/activist poets craft a gift this magnificent, take it."" -Mary Oishi, Albuquerque Poet Laureate Emerita and author of Sidewalk Cruiseship ""[T]hese poems address a wide range of themes and passions, always deeply moving as they remind us to struggle for social justice but also to rest and remember the people and things we love and struggle for; they are enriching and engaging."" -Irena Klepfisz, author of Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971-2021

Author Information

Demetria Martínez, writer, poet, activist, and journalist, covered religion for the Albuquerque Journal and was a national news editor and a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. Her widely translated novel Mother Tongue, set during the Sanctuary Movement, won a Western States Book Award. The novel was inspired by her 1987 indictment on charges of conspiracy in connection with allegedly transporting Central American refugees into the United States. The U.S. government attempted to use her poem ""Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women, 1986-1987"" against her. A jury acquitted her on First Amendment grounds. Martínez is the author of numerous poetry collections and the short story collection The Block Captain's Daughter (which received the 2013 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation). Her essay collection, Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana, won an International Latino Book Award. She has also received the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Susan Sherman is a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor and co-founder of IKON magazine. In the sixties, she was a poetry editor for The Nation and a poetry editor and theater critic for The Village Voice. She taught at the Free School of New York and the Alternate U., edited the first series of IKON magazine, and opened IKONbooks, a bookstore which served as a cultural and movement center. In the 1970s, she became active in the feminist and the gay liberation movements. In the 1980s, she reintroduced IKON as a feminist magazine. Sherman has had twelve off-off-Broadway productions and published her memoir, America's Child: A Woman's Journey Through the Radical Sixties, in 2007 to critical acclaim. She has published seven collections of poetry. She has also published a book of short fiction, Nirvana on Ninth Street, and a collaborative book of dialogue and poetry, We Stand Our Ground, with Kimiko Hahn and Gale P. Jackson. She has received the University Poetry Prize from UC Berkeley, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts for Creative Nonfiction Literature, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for Poetry, a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Creative Artist's Public Service Grant for poetry, and editors' awards from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and the New York State Council on the Arts.

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