West End Press

For one year after its arrival in the United States the dismantled Statue of Liberty sat in 214 unopened crates on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor. The poems in this book reflect the tension of this “pause” in many respects: the artist’s motives in constructing the pieces; the fluidity of the molten ore; the workers’ act of constructing, dismantling, and reassembling the statue; the anticipation embedded in the year on Bedloe’s Island; the vulnerability of a singular message as it travels across an ocean and over time; and the context into which the statue is finally unveiled.

In this award-winning debut, poet Jessica Helen Lopez ruminates on love and romance, motherhood, teaching, and the trials and tribulations of adulthood.

Passionate and sensuous, American Book Award winner Sasha Pimentel Chacon addresses both the mind and body in her debut book of poetry. The young Filipina poet proceeds with a sure understanding of the power of images to confront the instability of the world around her. Family, growth and decay, the politics of liberation are reflected with intensity.

The West End Press title, Always Messing with Them Boys by Jessica Helen Lopez, is one of the Tucson-Pima County Public Library’s selections in its annual Southwest Books of the Year list. Kudos Jessica!

El Paso author Sasha Pimentel Chacón recently won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her West End Press book Insides She Swallowed, a debut collection of thirty-one poems that use rich imagery to explore the human appetites. Chacón draws on metaphors of consumption and sensuality from her family life and Filipino […]

Jeanetta Calhoun Mish won the Wrangler Award from the Western Heritage Association and an Oklahoma Book Award for her debut. A woman with a history of hard traveling and a feminist intellectual with a formidable critical vocabulary, Mish adds heartbreak, lustiness, wisdom, Okie determination, and her Indian legacy to poetry accompanied by historic family photographs.

This first volume of plays by Cherrie Moraga includes “Heroes and Saints,” “Giving up the Ghost,” and “Shadow of a Man.” Cherrie Moraga is a major voice in Chicano/a, lesbian, feminist, and working class literature; her writing has been hailed as “the best kind of political work, performed with skill and sensitivity.”

A native son of the Embudo Valley in northern New Mexico, Levi Romero expresses the heart of a stranger at the margins of a city—Albuquerque. His sturdy judgment, self-deprecating humor, and respect for his friends and culture give this volume fresh appeal.