“Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA is a brave interrogation of self, and the split self, in an era that asks us to carry more than one identity with us at all times. DIANE SEUSS, AUTHOR OF PULITZER FINALIST, FOUR-LEGGED GIRL, AND STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA establishes an aesthetic of survival.” As a fellow traveler, I am grateful for Schwartz’s vision-that to name the break, to delineate the parts, is to bring forth a singular, sacred wholeness. To experience this collection is to encounter the “wild self choired, corralled in a thought box,” where “all of us together/can make a great sound,” a definition of lyric poetry if there ever was one. “We’ve all cracked/in our own ways,” Leslie Contreras Schwartz writes, and goes on to show us how, in a choir of voices-missing children, victims of sex trafficking, sex workers, border detainees, family members, and the always-hungering self. To fracture, these poems demonstrate, can be a wildly creative defense of the traumatized self.

“Resplendent in formal range, in image-richness, in music, empathy, and wisdom, the poems of BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA offer us a landscape of dissociation, of fragmentation in selfhood and in art. In stunningly varied forms and voices, BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA, examines the individual versus public bodies and documents narratives of those usually silenced, including people with mental illness, sex workers, women who are trafficked, and children in custody. ABOUT BLACK DOVE / PALOMA NEGRA (FlowerSong Press, 2020):

Lucy schwartz