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The University of Arizona Press     
355 S. Euclid Ave., Suite 103,
Tucson, AZ 85719
(800) 426-3797     
www.uapress.arizona.edu

Camino del Sol / New titles in Latina/o literary series
3 Book Sampler from UA Press

Flexible Bones
Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet
Odalisque in Pieces

Since 1994, the University of Arizona Press has published exceptional literary work by Latina and Latino authors in its critically acclaimed Camino del Sol series. Through poetry, fiction, and essays, noted writers including Ray Gonzalez, Juan Felipe Herrera, Patricia Preciado Martin, Demetria Martinez, Virgil Suárez, Sergio Troncoso, and Luis Alberto Urrea have explored the rich variety of Latina/o experience in America, creating a dynamic portrait of this vital culture. Publishers Weekly praised Camino del Sol as "a strong and growing presence in Latino literature," and New Mexico magazine called it a "notable series which brings the work of numerous talented poets and writers to a broad audience."     

Celebrating 50 years of publishing excellence

The University of Arizona Press, founded in 1959 as a department of the University of Arizona, is a nonprofit publisher of scholarly and regional books. As a delegate of the University of Arizona to the larger world, the Press publishes the work of scholars wherever they may be, concentrating upon scholarship that reflects the special strengths of the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and Northern Arizona University.

Flexible Bones
Poems by Maria Melendez
96 pp. / 6.0 x 9.0 / 2010
Paper (978-0-8165-2833-2)

The remarkable and wholly insightful poems collected here bounce the reader through a world where words are not bricks but trampolines—springy, un-static-y things. Feisty, spirited, serious and comic, these poems address a wild range of subjects with an equally wild range of tones. As readers, we find ourselves holding on with white knuckles, but we always want to turn the page.

The most modern of roller coasters ride on soft rubber tires and slithery smooth tracks. Gone are the days of jouncing along on steel wheels, smacking over hard metal joints. So it is with this book. Although readers are hurtled through time, space, and a universe of emotions, the ride is seductively smooth—and the transitions surprisingly seamless.

Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet
Poems by Dixie Salazar
120 pp. / 5.5 x 8.5 / 2010
Paper (978-0-8165-2851-6)  
        
“Duality” is at the center of Flamenco Hips and Red Mud Feet, a striking collection of poems both intimate and grand. The poet, Dixie Salazar, has spent a lifetime forging her own identity out of two cultures: “On one side was my father’s world: Spanish speaking from las montanas. On the other side was my mother’s world: a deep Southern drawl wafting from the magnolia and chinaberry trees.” As her poems reveal, she is a product of both cultures but not completely at home in either one.

Odalisque in Pieces
Carmen Giménez Smith
80 pp. / 6.0 x 9.0 / 2009
Paper (978-0-8165-2788-5)
    
In her debut poetry collection, Carmen Giménez Smith illuminates Latina identity in the prismatic light of postcolonial history, feminism, myth, and the fragmentation of modernity. From these disparate elements she fashions a female persona—“clairvoyant with great shoes”—who is both bracingly modern and movingly vulnerable. Through her poems we traverse the landscape of a woman’s life (girl, mother, lover), navigating a terrain tinted with mythology and relic yet still fresh and uncharted. The poems revolve around issues of identity—and the ways in which identity is both inherited and constructed/reconstructed. Or, as one poem puts it, “The planet floating backwards / whirling some of us older than the stars, some of us nascent and bare.” Although she employs techniques of avant-garde poetry, Giménez Smith shades and deepens the New World landscape into a territory of rare lyric intensity and energy. Humorous, sly, sexy, sophisticated, these poems are animated by passion and hard-won knowledge.

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