Lives of Straw by Diana Anhalt
$14.00
Diana Anhalt’s wonderfully engaging chapbook, Lives of Straw, picks up where she left off in her previous Second Skin. These delicious forays into Mexico and the lives of its endlessly inventive street survivors bring with them the immediacy and accessibility of Joseph Stroud, the playful humor of Billy Collins and a warmth and empathy only a person who has lived that culture can provide. From cliff diver to curandera, sidewalk scribes to pole fliers, Anhalt always hits the bulls-eye. For any lover of Mexico, this collection is a feast.
–Peter Ludwin, author of A Guest in All Your Houses, Rumors of Fallible Gods
Like the bearer of human burdens in “El Cargador,” Diana Anhalt carries us across the Rio Grande to a Mexico the tourist never sees, where the mundane becomes magical, and “lives of straw” are spun to purest gold.
–Dan Veach, www.danveach.com, Editor, Atlanta Review
Diana Anhalt‘s heart is big enough to move us from the Bronx to Mexico. The word “querer,” she writes, “to want, desire . . . refers to the waif in every living creature.” She wants us ” Here, on the corner of . . .” arriving in fellowship, in sisterhood. ” And listen to this . . . “We begin with her own urgency, then listen to the people in the streets. Two worlds, two languages: “This is the place I come from.” Anhalt’s craft, her lines holding us just right, create home.
–Myra Shapiro, author of 12 Floors Above the Earth, two other collections of poetry and a memoir
Rating: 
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Description
Lives of Straw
by Diana Anhalt
$14, paper
Mexico has always been home for Diana Anhalt, ever since her family moved there in 1950, and it figures prominently in her second chapbook, Second Skin (Future Cycle Press), as well as in her subsequent poetry, published in the United States and elsewhere.
Her essays, articles and book reviews, in both English and Spanish, often deal with migration and displacement. Following her parents’ deaths, she wrote A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1947-1965 (Archer Books), later published in Spanish, in an attempt to learn more about her family and others like them, who had fled the United States for Mexico during the McCarthy period. Just three years ago, she returned to the United States with her husband and settled in Atlanta in order to be closer to their children.
Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]
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