Chingona Rules by Melissa Castillo Planas

Powerful women have a chingona in them, and Castillo Planas compels the reader to appreciate this, in all the defiant tenderness of self- affirmation. Beautifully written in an English bilinguals are welcome to enter,  this poetry showcases the complex, nuanced voice of women in today’s America. Bravo!

–Dr. Liliana Trevizán, Professor, Modern Languages, SUNY Potsdam

In Chingona Rules, the word Chingona is synonymous with home. Sometimes home is found within the pages of history books or the love of Brown men, or in the resistance of her code switch. When home is a morbid memory the mind finds solace in the assurance of her identity, the comfort of a psych ward, the unburden of forgetting, and in the autonomy of legacy planning. Chingona Rules is at its core a love story, a manifesto of survival, and a reconciliation of mind, body, and spirit.

–Elisabet Velasquez, Poet

Chingona Rules is a handbook for resiliency and a radical love letter to unapologetic bodies that know “healing starts at the wound.” Melissa Castillo Planas proves we don’t have to bleed out in our poems in order to be heard, but if we choose to, we suture the wound and wear the scar proudly.  She invites us to dream boundlessly, despite the dystopian society she calls her American home of “fantasias imposibles” and rather than paint a perfect picture, Castillo Planas proudly points to her tattoos, with the smirk of satisfaction, self-acceptance, and ancestral knowledge that declares Chingonas like her “will not be contained.”

–Peggy Robles- Alvarado, poet