Show me the road—I'll follow the lilt of your shadow, by Donna Castañeda

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

This evocative collection of poems by Donna Castañeda explores the Sonoran Desert in Southern California/Northern Mexico, its immense age and beauty; the U.S.-Mexico border realities; and the natural world of this region. She observes in her poems how the landscape vibrates with a solitary beauty and quiet meaning. Desert windstorms, creatures both real and imaginary, and a landscape of richness and emptiness intertwine to create a new perspective on what it means to be of this area, one embedded in history, as well as the social, political, and environmental forces that shape contemporary responses to the border. Children, migration, water loss, and women’s unique lives are themes and both traditional and modern poetic forms are used to celebrate the natural environment, universalities of death and loss, loneliness, and finally, joy in lasting until the end to happily call out. . .

“Let us move over on the bench to give room to camels and ducks,
and not forget to turn off the light when our name is called.”

In a deceptively calm, quiet, yet ardent and tenacious voice, poems in this collection ask us to look closely at the most essentially human emotions, such as sorrow, desire, and love and thereby renew ourselves within them. They reach out to us, move us, transform us, and then place us in a location of sanctuary. Castañeda does not leave us to live forever in pain. We touch our own humanity in these poems and suddenly realize this is the most radical process we can experience. Just as The Cormorant, alone at the edge of the desert canal as the sun goes down “wills herself to exist,” these poems will continue forward to exist in their insightful lyricism.

Donna Castañeda’s work has appeared in Crosswinds; The San Antonio Review; Litmora; Green Linden Press; Cholla Needles; and the anthologies San Diego Poetry Annual and A Year in Ink: San Diego Writers, Ink, among others. She was recently awarded a small grant from California Humanities to provide poetry workshops to Latinx adolescents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Her MFA in poetry is from Antioch University, Los Angeles, but before that she earned her Ph.D. in social psychology and was a professor at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley for 30 years. She lives in Chula Vista, California, near the U.S.-Mexico border.