EDGECLIFF poems by ANGELINA SÁENZ
Angelina Sáenz’s debut collection is a candid look at life for a middle-aged Chicana in the three years following a divorce from a 22-year marriage. These poems reflect on motherhood, rebound love, and pursuing an MFA as a first-generation college student while looking back on a childhood of love and community in the midst of crushing poverty and violence. In this poetic memoir, readers will find themselves both wincing at painful experiences of loss and assault, while applauding her indomitable spirit. In this work, the rays of resilience and celebration shine through in her poetry. Whether Sáenz is sharing about her sons asking if she is writing a poem or cooking them dinner, detailing the features of her lover’s body, talking to a family services social worker as a child or confronting professors’ micro-aggressions, Edgecliff gives us a rare narrative of an Angelino who commands her place in the city of Los Angeles.
"Angelina Saenz's poetry is ferocious, defiant, and brave. A powerful testimony of a woman caught in a maelstrom who refuses to drown."
― Carla Trujillo, author of What Night Brings
“Edgecliff is an astounding portrait of a working mom's life told with jaw dropping honesty and a rhythm that is frankly arousing. So much is the beauty –– painted in images of cockroaches, evictions, broken bonds and shattered things, big brown bodies clashing against cognitive dissonance and structures not meant for us –– that I am left envious to have not lived them all myself.
― Erick Galindo, a five-time Telly Award-winning writer, director and producer and author of Sin Miedo podcast productions
“Every poem in Edgecliff feels like a short film of Angelina Sáenz’s memory that you can taste, smell, and feel in your bones. You will dance to the rhythm of the words. You will cry. You will laugh. You will be transported. And at the end, feel honored that she shared her world with us.”
― Megan Tan, Podcast Host and Producer
“Even while humidity wraps Angelina Sáenz’s “heart in banana leaves,” she is brimming with laughter, compassion and gratitude in poems that celebrate her sons and catalog her own coming of age as a mother, educator and Buddhist. Recalling the episodes that made her the strong woman she is, the stanzas in Edgecliff show her finding refuge in her second shift and receiving timeless wisdom channeled from her ancestors. These poems meditate on her daily journeys but end up revealing something much more extraordinary. I was inspired by her resilience and reminded by her realness that progress is incremental but when you stay with it, the results are incredible. Angelina Sáenz is for the people.”
― Mike Sonksen, author of I Am Alive in Los Angeles
"Angelina Sáenz’ work is the poetry that must—poetry born of sinew and struggle, born of the necessary hard exterior shell and the heat of the still burning heart within. Sáenz’ voice is unrelentingly honest and spare—powerfully in possession of itself. She writes, ”You add to my trauma/when you non-chalantly talk shit/about my work/which is the story of my people/of my mother/of my ancestors/of the kids that I grew up with/who ended up murdered, in prison or on drugs/of my perpetual grief,” and that same tough and tender voice demands and owns its space in our literature and our hearts, “whatever the fuck I give to you/is an offering of my life and sacrifice.”
― ire’ne lara silva, author of furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, and FirstPoems
Angelina Sáenz tells life stories (hers, ours) viscerally and with a hard-won clarity: stories of teachers, students, mothers, children, lovers, partners, friends, neighbors, against and beyond the backdrop of the urban Los Angeles evoked in her personal history (and her name), a place of utopias in the concrete. There is struggle in Edgecliff, violence and loss, but also joy and a deep sense of what Audre Lorde calls the uses of the erotic, as well as a biting and delicious class-conscious humor that animates list poems with unforgettable titles (“How to Eat a Free-Lunch Bologna Sandwich”) and short lyric bursts that are like jagged knives confronting us with the city most would rather not know: “my muertos’ blood pooled on your corners.” Like the elders evoked in these pages (Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Gioconda Belli), Sáenz knows that institutions won’t save us (read the anthemic “Dear professors (all of you fuckers)”!), and that we must begin by summoning the voices of our streets, our embodied geographies, from Nayarit to Edgecliff Drive and beyond. Forget the overly workshopped niceties, this debut collection will leave you another kind of mfa: más fuerte aún (music for all).
―Urayoán Noel, author of eight books of poetry, including Transversal and Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico
Angelina's Sáenz's poetry opens pathways to her most personal life experiences with her stunningly bold and intimate poems. Sáenz walks you down her neighborhood's dark and dangerous streets in search of a loved one whom she finds face down on a street corner. In another poem, she encourages her students to "color outside the lines" on art day. You might tear up after learning that it's all true. There are gifts here. Some are not easily unwrapped.
―Ron Baca is a poet and lifelong resident of L.A.'s Eastside and is a volunteer tutor at Homeboy Industries.
Edgecliff is the song one woman sings as she peers out over the new world she is fashioning for herself. And as she steps into that world, she pays homage to everything that brought her to this place, here, where she can finally breathe. In her unique, clear-eyed style, Angelina Saenz examines poverty and violation, love and determination, cruelty and stupidity, motherhood and the triumph of birthing oneself against the odds. Edgecliff is a grit chronicle, rhythmic and very much like song. Quiero más.
― Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of the chapbook, Slippery Surfaces