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Author Photo-Credit_ Angie Contini.png
when we were human revised2.jpg
Author Photo-Credit_ Angie Contini.png

When You Were Human by Natalia Treviño

$17.00

This collection of poetry offers readers multiple entry points to discover the Virgin Mary— as the miraculous mother of God and as the archetypal spiritual mother of all. By examining how Mary is introduced to us through prayer candles, car air-fresheners, ritual prayer, legend, and high art, this collection attempts to understand the devotions to Mary that unite people all over the world, especially in Mexico. Mary has over twenty-two thousand identities world-wide, but this collection only scratches the surface of those stories focusing on her as the unifying Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgen de San Juan de Los Lagos, and La Virgen de San Juan del Valle, and these poems meditate on her role as the compassionate, redeeming Mother of God. In a variety of traditions, she is united with nature—as the Goddess of Water, Yemaya, as Creator Goddess Coatlicue, as Tonantzin, as friend, companion, as intercessor, and as the spirit of a fellow human being who has experienced the deepest human suffering, the loss of her criminalized child to the violence of the state. The poems are political, reverent, fresh and varied in style. The collection includes an epilogue in Spanish by Levi Romero and translated by poet Julieta Corpus. The epilogue is a soulful response to the last section of the book, “Bitter Sorrows,” which is an adaptation of the Seven Sorrows of Mary prayercycle, in which Mary’s life story becomes lyric, prayer, gift and mystery.

When You Were Human is part of the Letras Latinas Publishing Collaborative.

This collection of poetry offers readers multiple entry points to discover the Virgin Mary— as the miraculous mother of God and as the archetypal spiritual mother of all. By examining how Mary is introduced to us through prayer candles, car air-fresheners, ritual prayer, legend, and high art, this collection attempts to understand the devotions to Mary that unite people all over the world, especially in Mexico. Mary has over twenty-two thousand identities world-wide, but this collection only scratches the surface of those stories focusing on her as the unifying Virgin of Guadalupe, La Virgen de San Juan de Los Lagos, and La Virgen de San Juan del Valle, and these poems meditate on her role as the compassionate, redeeming Mother of God. In a variety of traditions, she is united with nature—as the Goddess of Water, Yemaya, as Creator Goddess Coatlicue, as Tonantzin, as friend, companion, as intercessor, and as the spirit of a fellow human being who has experienced the deepest human suffering, the loss of her criminalized child to the violence of the state. The poems are political, reverent, fresh and varied in style. The collection includes an epilogue in Spanish by Levi Romero and translated by poet Julieta Corpus. The epilogue is a soulful response to the last section of the book, “Bitter Sorrows,” which is an adaptation of the Seven Sorrows of Mary prayercycle, in which Mary’s life story becomes lyric, prayer, gift and mystery.

When You Were Human is part of the Letras Latinas Publishing Collaborative.

Born in Mexico, Natalia Treviño is the author of VirginX (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014). She works as a Professor of English at Northwest Vista College and is a Macondista. She graduated from The University of Texas at San Antonio with her B.A. and M.A. in English, and she completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at The University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her awards include the Alfredo Cisneros de Moral Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the San Antonio Arts Foundation Literary Prize, the Menada Literary Award from Ditet e Naimet Poetry Festival in Macedonia, and an Ambroggio Prize for co-translation from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry appears in journals including Sugar House Review, Infrarrealista Review, Acentos Review, Plume, POETRY, Presence: a Journal of Catholic Poetry and others. Her work also appears in Mirrors Beneath the Earth: Short Fiction by Chicano Writers (Curbstone Press), Complex Allegiances: Constellations of Immigration (Wising Up Press), RiverSedge, and Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (University of New Mexico Press). Her first novel is forthcoming from Arte Público Press.

 

In Natalia Treviño’s luminous collection, When You Were Human, the speaker is “still learning the difference / between the prayer and the one who prays.”  Which is to say, in Treviño’s poetic vision, the Virgin Mary becomes more than a sacred symbol—she is mother, witness, shelter, and wound. She is the prayer and she is also the one who prays. All of these all at once because this is Her nature: to be found everywhere and anywhere—as an air-freshener dangling from a rearview mirror, as a figure on a necklace, or as a tattoo on a young man’s arm.  In these poems, divinity appears to us with “the faces we love,” be it son, Grandmother, or all the countless mothers who have lost a son to the State: “to chew tart blood, to press a knee to a neck.” Allusive and ekphrastic, Treviño’s language is also measured, devotional, grounded: “how much Mercy // will it take / for all the redemptions / we need,” she asks.  How to measure faith? How to measure love? I pray you read this book for answers, although none might be found, but be assured that these poems, like the Holy Mother, will travel into the different countries of your heart as “miracles // do, without papers.”

—Octavio Quintanilla, author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press) & Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press)

When You Were Human by Natalia Treviño makes the ordinary and the sacred sing in beautiful harmony. It connects the human body to nature and the supernatural. And it creates a tender intimacy between our icons and ourselves. In Treviño’s world, miracles and mercy wear sneakers; woes and wonders are joined at the hip. In short, these poems are magic.

—Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban and Vanishing Maps 

What a blessing to read Natalia Treviño’s collection of poetry, When You Were Human, is a meditation on the woman we know as—to keep it simple—Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. The thing is, from the very first poem, it turns out I don’t know her at all, not in the Convert The Unbeliever sort of way, but in the many iterations as a body and an ethereal mother she has become to the faithful across centuries. With Natalia we travel across the U.S-Mexico border, across the Atlantic to the Basilicas in Florence, Italy, and to the furthest galaxies in the Universe to investigate the mystery of Mary as “Mom of Mercy,” “co-redeemer,” and car air freshener. Written in a voice that is erudite and unaware of its own humility, Natalia delivers a book of poetry that edifies and disabuses with wit and imagination that will hopefully move you to your core like it did me.

—John Olivares Espinoza, author of The Date Fruit Elegies

When You Were Human bends through a meditative journey on the many apparitions of the Virgin Mary, guiding the reader into a space where the personal and the spiritual intimately intertwine. Natalia Treviño’s poetic voice—filled with awe and reverence—reveals how the sacred feminine enters our lives, and the poems flow with an ecstatic diction that breathlessly conjures lyrical visions of la Virgen’s divine majesty. In this spiritual quest to understand mercy, sorrow, love, and the divine, Treviño’s venerable poems illuminate every facet of our humanity, portraying the Virgin Mary as mother, grandmother, Coatlicue, Tonantzin, and all her radiant manifestations. These poems invite slow, deliberate reading—each one a moment to savor, carrying the depth and richness of a sacred encounter.

—Adela Najarro, author of Variations in Blue