Nightbloom & Cenote

Schwartz's second collection of poems examines the legacy of trauma and abuse among a family of women--and the ability of women and girls to survive. At times searing in grief, in other moments patient and willing to accept, Schwartz questions the truth behind any survival, what it looks like for a girl to emerge from the bottom of any cenote, or a city's residents to move forward after a hundred-year flood.

Call all thriving things illegal: / The magnolia tree, its roots, / That vast network of veins that feeds itself / And others like it in dry soil, / Pushes space through concrete sidewalks / To breathe ... Every tough, gnarled thing holding / Its own life in a fist of vitality is illegal.

--from" Everything is Illegal," Nightbloom & Cenote

Author: Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Published: 05/18/2018
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.34d
ISBN: 9780998640464

About the Author
Contreras Schwartz, Leslie: - Leslie Contreras Schwartz's first book, Fuego, was published by Saint Julian Press in 2016, which Inprint Houston's Rich Levy named one of the best books in 2016 by a Houston author. Her writing has recently appeared in Catapult, The Texas Review, and Tinderbox, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was named a finalist for the 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Contest for Cutthroat: A Journal ofthe Arts. Schwartz was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Houston Poet Laureate and was recently a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky. Schwartz earned an MFA in poetry from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 2011 and graduated from Rice University in 2002. She teaches writing in Houston where she lives with her family. Visit her Amazon author page at: amazon.com/leslie-contreras- schwartz and read more of her work at lesliecschwartz.com.