Maps for Migrants and Ghosts

“In the face of injustice, these poems urge us to ‘say danger and defiance. / Not shoulder shrug, not fold over.’ And perhaps it also becomes the task of the poet to reconcile where she can; to try to sweeten the life, past or present; to be the ginger flower whose ‘torch burns with scent in the middle / of the garden. Not even the rain can put it out.’ These poems are adamantine—dazzling and diamond-strong. In language at once keen and lulling, muscular and sumptuous, Igloria gives us a book of losses as well as recuperations.” —Claire Wahmanholm, author of Wilder
 
“Restlessly transiting between the past and the present, homeland and diasporic home, consciousness and conscience, Luisa Igloria is our poet of the lyric cusp. In poems that deconstruct memory into its parts—complex nostalgia, bittersweet love—Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is at once gorgeous and painful. I read this book with intensity, feeling, in the words of one poem, ‘ecstatic and furious.’”—Rick Barot, author of The Galleons
 
“‘It's telling, the things / we return to,’ writes Luisa A. Igloria in this masterful new collection, where memory takes us on a journey that is full of music and wisdom. I opened this book on the poems about her mother and fell in love with this voice, one that has learned to be ‘completely alone, even among others,’ a voice that knows how to enter the dark and find music in it. This lyric record of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts is a journey both spiritual and personal, one that understands that at our most private we still live in history, yet finds, in the terrors of that history, a healing melody, a tune.”—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
 
“Urgent yet delicate, Luisa A. Igloria’s poetry excavates the rich material of the past. The poems fashion and refashion the self in flashes of dreams, apparitions of family long departed, and haunting regret. To cross the interstitial moments in these lyrical moments is to understand the losses one encounters when the world is leaving you behind. Yet in spite of the burdens catalogued in these remarkable poems, Igloria’s power is in returning us to a residence in beauty when the voices of crickets return us to their scintillate choruses.”—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth and Furious Lullaby