Leslie Contreras Schwartz

Black Dove / Paloma Negra Leslie Contreras Schwartz

Poetry. Latinx Studies. Women's Studies. In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody.

Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self. 'We've all cracked/in our own ways, ' Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices--missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To experience this collection is to encounter the 'wild self choired, corralled in a thought box, ' where 'all of us together/can make a great sound, ' a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz's vision--that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. BLACK DOVE/PALOMA NEGRA establishes an aesthetic of survival.