Reverberating Voices, poems by Ernesto M Garay
Reverberating Voices, speaks about the Central American diaspora-- multiple voices retelling Garay’s personal history and the histories of others--the various oppression: political persecution, racism, class, and gender inequities, etc. Diasporic oppression is experienced on both sides of the US-Mexican border by both Salvadorans and Nicaraguans during the Salvadoran civil war and Nicaraguan Revolution in the 1980s. Although Reverberating Voices represents the oppressive struggles suffered by Central Americans in the US and in their homeland, its characters speak as heterogeneous subjects of history, speaking collectively about their histories of Diaspora and love. Also, Reverberating Voices will fill a void in the United States because stories about the Central America-Latino Diaspora are for the most part underrepresented within the US Latino Literary canon.
Praise for Reverberating Voices
"Reverberating Voices is a sacred passageway to another world where justice, truth, and beauty intersect to reimagine a better pathway. Calling upon ancestral voices, collective wisdom, and genealogies of resistance, Garay summons a generation of warriors, culture keepers, and relatives who spin a kinship matrix from Nicaragua to revolution, from politics to love, from ceremony to landscapes. This powerful new collection will teach us about thrivance and how we can all get there together---to a place of radical love. A must read for anyone serious about love and transformative justice!"
-Andrew Jolivette, Professor and Chair, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
-Author of Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change
The poetry of Ernesto M. Garay is what happens when the seemingly unstoppable forces of racism, xenophobia, and the general heartlessness of capitalism come up against will and determination of a quiet immovable dignity. Early on the poet Garay tells the reader that this work emerges from the fringes of broken history. The poet then spends the rest of the book making them whole. Garay's Reverberating Voices is filled with understated anthems woven together by a steady craft that leads the reader by way of detail, humor, an unflinching honesty and an expansive soul through the landscape of a hostile country. When times call for strength and courage read this stunning collection and allow these voices to reverberate in the depths of your spirit for years to come.
-Matt Sedillo, Author of City On The Second Floor, and Mowing Leaves Of Grass
Ernesto M. Garay’s poetry is a complex psychic possession moving back and forth between valence spirits and the music of local gestures almost painted still; painted history with multi-intelligences. These poems lead your mind to new potentials of psychic cohabitation; your kinetic place or ability to listen as ancestor, informal witness, revolutionary protagonist, and poetry fan all at once. Reverberating Voices is the volcanic dance of a healer; the ceremony in the alley; the wisdom of our oldest friends.
-Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco's 8th Poet Laureate