When Living Was a Labor Camp (Camino Del Sol)

Rating:
Summary: Diana Garcia Explodes into the Millennium
Review: Just a few words: Diana Garcia's collection is a rare mix of literary power, hard-won truths, wimin's realities and soulful flames come burnin' out of the page into our consciousness. I haven't seen a book with these valencies since Lorna Dee Cervantes' break-through Emplumada! And she reminds us --without bombast -- about this earth, its workers, its campesino childhoods, hungers and shames and incandescent liberations. Diana Garcia has lived many lives, for many lives -- and now it is her life-lines we can hold, for a moment at least, as "birds of paradise/against a gold-lit world." Gracias, Diana.

Rating:
Summary: Wow.
Review: This debut book of poems is a wonder, and was written by someone whose wise voice should have been heard a long time before now. Diana Garcia is the daughter of Mexican migrant workers in California's San Joaquin Valley, the granddaughter of a curandera, the mother of a son who migrates on hiw own to Kansas, and the wife of a man who toasts her with kind glances. And there are other close relations, a nest within which Garcia illuminates difficulty and endurance, the extraordinary in the everyday, and the persistence of love.

The book is divided into several sections, among them memoroes of living in labor camps, evocative poems in several voices honoring the lives of apparently ordinary women, startling poems on the matter of racism, and warm poems about her relations to intimates. The book involves a number of poetric styles, and this variety hones the reader's attention to this one poet who writes what she knows into the profound.