Height:
5'2" or 157.48cm last measured.
Diminishing with age.
However, simultaneously
Growing in self-worth. (147)

Lovely, worth spending a few days working through this short collection. ( )

Thank you to Sandra Cisneros, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Knopf, and Netgalley for this advanced reader copy (ARC) of "Woman Without Shame: Poems" in exchange for an honest review.

I love this. I love this. I love this. I found my heart in my throat, in between my teeth, and pressing to get out from between my lips as I read several of these pieces. I love her strong, unashamed reality of everything about the aging body, about interacting with modernity, with the clashes between Mexico and the US, with death and sex, and generations that are ashamed of these things.

I will be ending up with a personal copy of this one and one for my classroom. ( )

Trickster time arrived
while I slept.
It takes some getting used to.
I watch my transformation
bemused. Just as I once
watched myself alter into
my woman’s body. Watch
and marvel now as then.
Relieved to some degree.
Fascinated with where
I am and where I am
traveling.

Stepping On Skin from Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is famous for her novel A House on Mango Street. It’s been twenty-eight years since she published a book of poetry. The poems in Woman Without Shame are fierce, visceral, lyric, and even humorous. She reflects on her life from the vantage point of experience. It is gratifying to encounter poetry about a woman’s experience.

Canto for Woman of a Certain Age is hilarious, inspired by Dylan Thomas, raging against sensible white grannie underwear. She writes about Floaters, caused by the aging of the vitreous layer of the eye, and being told it’s harmless. (Perhaps, but I have so many it interferes with reading.) She wonders how Mrs. Gandhi reacted to her famous husband’s decision for celibacy.

As a Mexican American living in Mexico, she encounters the beauty of the ordinary and the horror of political and social evil. El Hombre begins with a girl’s death, “It’s her father’s debts./This is how they pay/Un Hombre who can’t pay.” Interspersed through the poem is the refrain,”Mandanos lux. Send us all light.” In To A–, she writes about narcos collecting protections from vendors and of the people who have disappeared. (My cousin married a Mexican and at retirement they moved to Mexico and built a beautiful hacienda. He was shot on the street.)

She recalls her youth. “We were all on the run in ’82,/Jumping to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”/The summer’s theme song.” She remembers lovers and sex.

In Woman Seeks Her Own Company, her self-portrait begins “Profession: Word Weaver,” and she concludes “Artistry: At sixty-five convinced/Just getting started.” I love the strength and affirmation of this insight.

At seventy, I understand Cisneros’ on so many levels. The changed body. (Oh, yes, in ’82 the men called out to me on the streets of Philadelphia.) The acceptance of the changes, not seeing aging as a declination, but a strength, understanding that one hones one’s art as a life long process.

Cisneros was a poet first, she writes in the Acknowledgements, and she has continued to write poetry. Woman Without Shame represents decades of unpublished work. These poems will be an inspiration to women, and hopefully inspire us all to be without shame.

Thanks to #AAKnopf for a free book. ( )