Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (a review)

Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (a review)

This last weekend, I participated in my friend liz gonzález’s book launch party at the San Bernardino History & Railroad Museum inside the San Bernadino Santa Fe Depot. Her book is called “Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected” (Los Nietos Press 2018). liz gonzález is amazing. And her book is sublime. She is a San Bernardino Valley native and goes back four generations.

liz's writing sparkles. It is so vivid, and if voice was measured in heartbeats, her heart rate would be off the charts. And, liz’s book is all heart, grounded in family and the geography of the San Bernardino Valley where she grew up. The craft and skill is evident from the very first page. The book defies genre. Poems and prose. Part memoir. In it, you hear the voice of liz along with her mother, grandmother, and sisters.

Her definition of Latinx is one that puts the typical stereotype on its head.  Her narrator is funny and self deprecating. Take for example this excerpt from her poem, "Confessions of a Pseudo-Chicana":

"...Mama raised us on Hamburger Helper and Macaroni and Cheese.

She never even made a pot of beans.

I learned how to make tortillas

from Mrs. MacDougall in home ec.

Mama still uses the recipe."

The book is nostalgic but unsentimental. In most of my favorite books, place is a character. And, place is everything in liz's work. California is a character and more specifically and importantly, the Inland Empire is a character. And even more specific than that, San Bernardino is a character, a city that has been long neglected from the California literary discourse. Until now. Take for example this excerpt from liz's poem, "The Summer Before 9th Grade" where she creates a narrator who is linked to both past and present, the old and the new, connecting Robert Frost and San Bernardino.

"I made a pit stop at Esperanza Market

on Mount Vernon Avenue where the butcher

wrapped up a pickled pigs' pig’s foot for me.

With my legs sweat-stuck to the plastic bench seat,

I gnawed that pata to the bone,

cooled off with Robert Frost’s poems.

The bus slanted up Fifth Street to Foothill

while I dove deep into songs of tinkling brooks

and leafless woods until my stop

at the bench on Meridian Avenue." 

To read more, you will have to buy the book and it is available on the press' website at https://squareup.com/store/los-nietos-press/. And see liz's reading and event schedule at http://www.lizgonzalez.com/pages/appearances.html.

 You will be blown away.

 (Excerpts from poems are from “Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected” by liz gonzález)

liz's book "Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected" (picture by Juanita E. Mantz)