Sundress Publications is pleased to announce that Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s debut full-length poetry collection, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, is for pre-sale from now until October 14th!
Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge is a feminist collection of poetry straddling borders, and arose when daughter of Mexican immigrants, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, traveled from Los Angeles to the Tucson-Sector of the U.S.-Mexico border in August 2011 to volunteer with the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths. She hoped to gain a concrete understanding of the “wall,” and the result was a book illustrating a speaker driven to activism by a need to honor her family’s journey.
You can pre-order Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge here.
I am moved by Xochitl-Julisa’s work, her embrace of familia, of places long gone and present, of abandoned things too, near or in a neighborhood house yet filled with luminous power as a “black lava molcajete,” a “mano,” and many kinds of cacti—enduring, inscrutable, fierce & makers of nectar. Perhaps her verses are gazing at the border-crosser—perhaps at you and me. I found joy in Xochitl-Julisa’s work, her caring journeys, places I have traveled. Her touch is that of an artist. Unique, light and expansive humanity. ¡Bravissimo, Xochitl-Julisa!
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s poems rattle the heart, jolt the mind. Moving from the “tender emerald bites” of nopales shared around a table to the brutal desert terrain crossed by immigrants, she interrogates the intimate and the political. Inventive, glimmering with Spanish, her language punctures silence and makes visible resilience. Her language is also curious; it’s shaped by the work of Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo and it cruises through the city of Los Angeles. These poems weren’t written to provide solace. These poems will break you in a thousand beautiful ways.
—Eduardo C. Corral, 2011 Yale Younger Poets Prize winner for Slow Lightning
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a 2016-2017 Steinbeck fellow and former Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner. She has work published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and The James Franco Review. A cofounder of Women Who Submit, her debut collection Posada: Offerings of Wintess and Refuge is forthcoming from Sundress Publications.
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