Description

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In Cipota under the Moon, Claudia Castro Luna scores a series of poems as an ode to the Salvadoran immigrant experience in the United States. The poems are wrought with memories of the 1980s civil war and rich with observations from recent returns to her native country. Castro Luna draws a parallel between the ruthlessness of the war and the violence endured by communities of color in US cities; she shows how children are often the silent, unseen victims of state-sanctioned and urban violence. In lush prose poems, musical tankas, and free verse, Castro Luna affirms that the desire for light and life outweighs the darkness of poverty, violence, and war. Cipota under the Moon is a testament to the men, women, and children who bet on life at all costs and now make their home in another language, in another place, which they, by their presence, change every day.

About the Author

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CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA has been an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate fellow, the Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of One River, A Thousand Voices; the Pushcart nominated Killing Marías, shortlisted for the Washington State 2018 Book Award in poetry; and the chapbook This City. Her most recent nonfiction can be found in the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis. Born in El Salvador, she came to the United States in 1981. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle on unceded Duwamish lands where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.

Praise For…

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“Castro Luna moves between litany and lamentation with a memorable grace.” —Tod Marshall, author of Bugle

“Claudia Castro Luna, both poetically and physically, settles spaces that were unclaimed by Latinos.” —Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, author of A Most Improbable Life