Black Dove/Paloma Negra by Leslie Contreras Schwartz, finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters.

In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody.

“Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self. “We’ve all cracked/in our own ways,” Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices—missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To experience this collection is to encounter the “wild self choired, corralled in a thought box,” where “all of us together/can make a great sound,” a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz’s vision—that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA establishes an aesthetic of survival.”

—DIANE SEUSS, AUTHOR OF PULITZER FINALIST, FOUR-LEGGED GIRL, AND STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL

“Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA is a brave interrogation of self, and the split self, in an era that asks us to carry more than one identity with us at all times. Filled with wild horses, lost continents, alternating voices, and missing women this book asks the reader: How does one calm the voices of trauma to get through the day, a year, a life? At once troubling and filled with hope, these poems are hungry storms that will rock you awake, then help you salvage wood to build a boat, and sail you to shore.”

—NATALIE SCENTERS-ZAPICO, LANNAN FELLOW AND AUTHOR OF LIMA :: LIMÓN

“When she began researching sex trafficking several years ago, Houston Poet Laureate Schwartz (Fuego) suddenly came face to face with the long-suppressed anguish of an abusive high school relationship. What resulted is this arresting study of individuals, from the sex trafficked to the mentally ill, who dissociate from their selves to avoid trauma. The first poem lands with a wallop, as nightmarish, bunkered horses embody her past pain ("These are my animals. If I destroy them, I destroy myself"), while the following poems, real and raw, detail the experience of splintering ("sacred self fractured self part times part to choir self// …loud architecture// …uproar, racket, orchestra harmonic// …golden trapped space of your own body." VERDICT Appropriately, syntax sometimes fractures here along with the self, intensifying an experience Schwartz captures in vervy writing.”

—LIBRARY JOURNAL