STANDARDS: Reviews V8 N1

Authors and Editors in Review

Gloria Anzaldúa

Nick Carbó and Eileen Tabios

Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort

Leticia Hernández-Linares

Best of the Small Presses Award 2005-2006: Aunt Lute Books

We at STANDARDS are pleased to announce the recipient of our Best of the Small Presses Award for 2005-2006 is San Francisco's Aunt Lute Books.

The ten titles listed below are each strongly recommended for both personal reading and classroom instruction. Our readers may be familiar with one or more of the samplings from Aunt Lute's treasure trove catalog. Be assured that the new additions are of equally high value. For further details and purchase information, please follow the links to the individual reviews of selected titles.

Congratulations to Aunt Lute Books, a venerable and necessary independent publisher of uncommon quality and breadth.

Canéla Analucinda Jaramillo, Ph.D.

Boulder, Colorado

Alice Walker Banned

by Alice Walker, with an introduction by Patricia Holt

Thus an important lesson about censorship: You can't ban something just because it may or might or could or can offend somebody. One of the strengths of a democracy lies in bringing together many different points of view, any of which will certainly offend one or more persons at some time or another, to get to the truth of a matter. It would be awful, and illegal, than heaven, if we all had to conform to one way of thinking -- that would not be the truth; it would be state-originated propoganda.

- Patricia Holt, from the Introduction

Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers

eds. Nick Carbó and Eileen Tabios

The tradition of women's writing in the Phillipines can be traced back to the pre-historic era of the archipelago when, in certain communities, priestess-poets called babaylan (Bisayan) and catalonan (Tagalog) held sway in the spiritual and ritualistic lives of the people. These women provided healing, wisdom, and direction for the inhabitants of their barangays (towns) with morality stories, myths, poems, prayers, and chants.

-Nick Carbó, from the Introduction

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

by Gloria Anzaldúa

However, what is happening, after years of colonization, is that all the divides disappear a little bit because the colonizer, in his or her interactions with the colonized, takes on a lot of their attributes. And, of course, the person who is colonizing leaks into our stuff. So we are neither one nor the other; we are really both. There is no pure other; there is no pure subject and not a pure object. We are implicated in each other's lives.

- Gloria Anzaldúa, from the second edition interview

Cancer Journals, Special Edition

by Audre Lorde

11/19/79

I want to write a rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile. I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.

- Audre Lorde, from The Cancer Journals, Special Edition

Junglee Girl

by Ginu Kamani

For all the ease with which Lakshmi bhabhi picked up the Gujarati language and followed every Gujarati custom concerning food, cleanliness and finances set up by our family, she was never ever considered Gujarati. She was always referred to as "that Punjabi." There was an invisible line that she could never cross, even after she had become one of the most powerful women in our family. For me, the very fact that she would never turn into a Gujarati made her my favorite female relative. I couldn't really explain why.

- Gina Kamani, from Junglee Girl

Making Face/ Making Soul: Haciendo Caras

edited by Gloria Anzaldúa

"Face" is the surface of the body that is the most noticeably inscribed by social structures, marked with instructions on how to be mujer, macho, working class, Chicana. As mestizas — biologically or culturally mixed — we have different surfaces for each aspect of identity, each inscribed by a particular subculture. We are "written" all over, or should I say, carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience.

The world knows us by our faces, the most naked, most vulnerable, exposed and significant topography of the body.

Gloria Anzaldúa, from the Introduction

Shell Shaker

by LeAnne Howe

"I thought only the Cherokees walked the Trail of Tears."

"The Choctaws were the first tribe to be removed from our ancient homelands. Our people walked all the way from the Lower Mississippi Valley to Oklahoma with very little to eat or drink. The road to the promised land was terrible. Dead horses and their dead riders littered the way. Dead women lay in the road with babies dried to their breasts, tranquil, as if napping. A sacred compost for scavengers."

"So how many died?"

"Four thousand."

"Excuse me?"

"Four thousand Choctaws."

"The total number of Indians?"

"Thousands."

"Ouch. But how do you know that for sure?"

"Andrew Jackson's government took a census before and after."

"Census takers make mistakes."

"Yes, ma'am, exactly right, it could have been more."

- LeAnne Howe, from Shell Shaker

Through the Eye of the Deer: An Anthology of Native American Women Writers

eds. Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort

The fact that these stories are told again and again in our modern world and will continue to be told into the next millenium is astonishing, especially since American Indian people, often dismissed or romanticized, continue to struggle to be heard by mainstream Americans.

Through the Eye of the Deer showcases women writers of American Indian descent who are reshaping and retelling traditional stories in a modern context. In the pre-television, pre-radio days, tribal stories were not only told to entertain families and/or clans on long, cold winter nights, but were also used as a means of teaching and commenting upon socially approved ways of behaving. It is our hope, given the present interest in American Indian spirituality, that this volume will function as tradition has always functioned: to provide the audience with ancestral American Indian values and understanding that they can use in everyday life. But we also encourage all readers (American Indian and non-American Indian) to read on their own terms - to see these stories as retellings of ancient, traditional stories, or to see them as contemporary reflections of life as American Indian women, or to read them another way entirely.

- Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort, from the Introduction

Unforgetting Heart: An Anthology of Short Stories by African American Women, 1859 - 1993

edited by Asha Kanwar

The development of the short story genre indicates how the writers come to terms with their own identity, celebrating their Blackness, thus subverting the insidious thrust of racism. The earlier stories, rooted as they are in a "genteel tradition," often capitulate to mainstream perspectives on Black life and letters. This denial evolves into a feeling of nationalism, then protest, the militancy of the 1960s and then, in the 1970s, a coming to terms with their own identity as Black women.

As we move towards the twenty-first century, we notice yet another shift in the concerns of Black women writers. They take on the complexity of being a Black person in a racist society. Their focus now includes Black men and other women of color, as exemplified in the last selection of this anthology, Wanda Coleman's "Croon." . . .

The progression of these stories, then, is an oral history of Black women struggling to take what is rightfully theirs, even if it means wrenching it from those who would deny it. And for this struggle to bear fruit, it becomes imperative to form coalitions with other women of color, not simply on the basis of identity but on the basis of shared concern.

- Asha Kanwar, from the Introduction

Also in This Issue

We are pleased to present reviews of the following new titles from San Diego's Calaca Press . . .

Razor Edges of My Tongue

by Leticia Hernández-Linares

cuidado

esta dama te reclama la trauma
y te hace trampa

but who tramps who
to give her a dime
for her little skeleton drawing
that you'll sell for ten times

calavera
cadáver
transparent is my soul
look for how little
you were sold

*english in italics. y qué

- Leticia Hernandez-Linares, from "For Sale"

Santa Perversa & Other Erotic Poems

by alejandra ibarra

last night,
i wanted sexual stimulation
go to a boys club
jam with the dancers to house music
feel welcomed in your space
have moments of bliss
I seek you

silhouettes dancing to the seditious beats
taking us higher and higher
as we pray to the vinyl incantations
I lose myself in the musical trance
I seek you

. . .

no need for kissing
just dance with me once again

- alejandara ibarra, from "dancing silhouettes"

Plus . . .

From Writer's Showcase, an imprint of iUniverse, we applaud the release of a new Latino work:

In Memory of Gods and Heroes

by Esteban A. Martinez

It's day seven at the range now. I've called my boss, the dean of Arts and Humanities, and told him that I had a family emergency, that I was leaving town and that he'd need to find someone to finish my classes this semester, I'll try to come back if I can. He seemed upset but I didn't give him any space to argue.

"It's a family emergency," I said. "I'm leaving for Mexico in an hour."

Then I hung up.

I'm not sure why I'm practicing. It doesn't take much to walk up to someone with a .45, point it to their head and pull the trigger. At least it doesn't take much of an aim.

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